During the 1990s, youths across the nation (especially in inner-cities) have increasingly disdained crack, but expanded their interest in marijuana. Limited ethnographic findings from other projects strongly suggest that the renewed interest in marijuana might reflect an emerging practice of blunt smoking (marijuana wrapped with a cigar shell and smoked via deep inhalation) and that a new subcultural pattern is emergent. The project has the following aims:
Aim A: (Use Practices) To analyze the use patterns, conduct norms, subcultures, and variations in youthful marijuana and blunt use; to identify how these are related to use of other illegal drugs and tobacco products.
Aim B: (Social Settings) To analyze the social, economic, and physical contexts (both private and public) where youths create and maintain (both legally and illegally) their regular consumption of marijuana, tobacco, and blunts.
Aim C: (Markets) To scientifically document the interaction of retail markets associated with blunt use regarding access to various tobacco products with marijuana and other illegal drug markets.
Aim D: (Integrate Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis) To establish the findings by developing quantitative instruments, and analyzing data about types of smoking behaviors among larger samples of youths. The project will interview, observe and follow over the course of five years (an omnibus longitudinal ethnography), focal subjects recruited at ages 11-26 from Harlem and the Lower East Side of New York City; focal subjects will beta selected to represent diverse age groups, ethnicities, and substance use patterns. This ethnography will delineate current blunt use practices, impacts upon lifestyles, maturation, and the evolution of youthful drug subcultures. The project includes two modest quantitative analyses. A secondary analysis of a New York City School Survey and Peer Group Questionnaires will help establish the prevalence of marijuana and/or blunt use patterns among New York City youths within ethnicity and age groups and show whether the experiences of ethnographic focal subjects are typical A vigorous publication agenda will integrate qualitative and quantitative findings across time and subjects' lives and identify policy implications of this preferred substance use pattern among many youths coming of age in first decade of the 21st Century.
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