Times they are a changing

While Becker does make some fairly good points, I think that some of them have become somewhat outdated and in the future might become even further from how pot was both viewed and used when he wrote about the subculture of pot.  One of the the reasons that I think this is because what people think as "pot" or "weed" has actually changed greatly from the 1960's.  One of the main differences is that the potency of marijuana has increased almost ten fold from advanced breeding techniques used by both illegal growers and medicinal growers.  This makes the whole smoking correctly less important.  Also in places like California where marijuana is legal for medical purposes they have used oils to extract the THC and used it to make a variety of goods including chap-stick that will get you high.  This same potency difference also brings up the question that if it is that much more potent it will be easier to get much higher and you would feel the effects and not have to think about them.  While I am not admitting or denying using marijuana, when you get high, you know it.  As far as needing an internal guide for smoking marijuana, with the popularization of it's use though movies like "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" everyone knows that when you smoke marijuana you get hungry, and everyone knows that stoners love listening to music to which there is a fairly strong correlation.  This has made pot knowledge much more mainstream which kind of eliminates the need for an internal guide.  I read the entire article and some of the things did make a great deal of sense, however with the way the culture of marijuana has gone in my opinion it has outdated some of his ideas.  I do agree with his discussion about going from not accepting the use of marijuana to not really caring if friends or people around you do it, since I did have much different thoughts about it before college.