Smoke What?: An Ethnography Of Smokers

Finally on April 10, 2002 at 6:30pm for 6 minutes I observed three students, all women, who were smoking cigarettes outside of my dorm. All of these sources combined to give me a lot of information about the culture of those whom smoke cigarettes.
             These sources supported the theory that cigarette smokers are also drug users. "Tobacco as a gateway drug," stated that The National Institute of Drug Abuse found that 12 to 17 year olds who smoke cigarettes are 3 times more likely to use alcohol, 14 times more likely to abuse alcohol, 100 times more likely to smoke marijuana, and 32 times more likely to use cocaine than their non smoking peers. "Cigarettes as a gateway," also provided a lot of information as well as similar statistics, and the article added that in their study there seemed to be a strong, dose-dependant relationship between smoking behavior and binge drinking: 39 percent of 159 students who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day reported at least 10 episodes of binge drinking in the two weeks prior to the survey, compared with fewer than 1 percent of non-smoking students. The observation I performed showed that the two women outside who smoked cigarettes decided not to do their school work that night and instead go out and party while the woman who wasn't smoking stayed home. All of the students that I interviewed use or have used illegal drugs, but when they were asked if they think that their smoking of .
             cigarettes has in anyway influenced or progressed their used of these substances, 3 of.
             Smoking 3.
             them said "no" while only 2 said "yes." But you may be asking yourself, what does all of the information I found mean or how can it relate to society at large?.
             Most cigarette-smoking individuals use illegal drugs at some point in their life. All of the studies that I found used students, usually of middle school and/or high school, age as their subjects. This may not seem like an accurate representation of the whole smoking population, but since I wanted to know about a drug-user subculture within the smoking culture, this was a good age for the doctors and other investigators involved to study.