Is Smoking Pot a Feminist Act?

This post, written by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, originally appeared on Feministing

Do you think men smoke more weed than women? Is that a proven fact? Have you ever been to the Bay Area? LOL. OK seriously, this article in the Stranger (and as a tribute to Hempfest) is about gender and weed smoke and how women don't smoke weed.

Smoking pot is a guy thing. Guys are the ones who deal, buy, and smoke. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that adult males were 50 percent more likely to have smoked marijuana in the last month than females. (Alcohol use showed only a 12 percent difference.) All illegal drugs show this approximate divide between the sexes (except illegally obtained prescriptions--women use those in substantially higher numbers).

Is this actually true? Or do women hide that they smoke weed more? A very quick look at my friends, I would say half the women I know smoke weed all the time. Even in my women's studies undergrad, I knew a lot of female stoners. In fact I have never attributed smoking weed to being a male activity. Perhaps this says something about the kind of women I hang out with, but this is seriously news to me.

Reading more into the article, I did have to agree that media depictions of drug use are in general inaccurate and definitely sexist. The war on drugs is extremely racist and gendered with little conversation about how drugs affect the lives of young women, while being absurdly focused on the incarceration of young men. Furthermore, the usual drug user is depicted as male.

But on a much less serious note, maybe women don't like to look lazy. . .