What exactly is dope? Over time, it’s meant marijuana, heroin, steroids, butter, coffee, drugs given to racehorses, and myriad other substances affecting the recipient in some excitable way. The term didn’t come to mean marijuana until the ’40s, and if you were born before 1970s, chances are you’d think stoned means drunk. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Evolution of “Dope””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey there, this is Tyson from Seattle.
Hi, Tyson.
Welcome.
What can we help you with?
Well, I’m in grad school studying to become a counselor, and I’m taking this class on introduction to counseling children and adolescents. And since I’m in school, all of our assignments are at least 10 years out of date, as far as readings are concerned. So they use some terms that are a little outdated. And since we’re reading about teenagers, we came across the marijuana use. And the thing that I noticed was that a lot of the authors would call it smoking dope. And I’m 24, but all my life, whenever I’ve heard someone use that term, smoking dope, it was always an indicator that they were, like, old and out of touch and had no idea what they were talking about. And maybe they were fronting, you know. Maybe they were faking it. So that got me thinking. First of all, is this a regional thing or is this a generational thing? Second, when did that change? When did smoking dope become not marijuana? And also, is this a common phenomenon where older slang terms aren’t just out of date? They’re also indicators of sort of being out of touch.
So, Tyson, this is really interesting. So if I talked about kids smoking dope, you would think that I was an old fogey. I wouldn’t be credible. Are you certain that it’s all about marijuana and not also about opium or something else?
Yeah, yeah. In the readings, it’s always in reference to marijuana. And in my life, dope is pretty much exclusively a reference to steroids.
Okay. Very good. Well, dope has got a long and complicated history here. And it’s not easy to dispense with it, no pun intended. But it has met a variety of drugs over the long history of the word. It has met hash. It’s met opium. It’s met heroin. It’s met marijuana. It’s met just plain old medicine. It’s met butter. It’s met coffee. It’s met the kind of drugs that you might give a racehorse. It has met steroids. Dope is used for any kind of substance that somehow affects the recipient in a noticeable or excitable way. That’s it. Some way that you get a positive or enthusiastic response from the person. And dope has been used for the chemicals that are used on canvas airplanes. It’s been used to apply to any kind of substance that gets smeared on anything else. Dope is one of the incredibly diverse words. It began to be used in marijuana in probably the 1940s and has been used for marijuana ever since. But as you say, it’s a little bit marked now. And because of the diverse meanings of dope, it depends completely upon who you are, what you think the primary meaning of dope is. And so it might be intergenerational, but because you come from a world where steroids maybe are something that people talk about or that you read about, then maybe for you, dope is primarily meaning steroids. But somebody in their 50s, my father, who was a cop, he’s actually in his 70s, he would say dope. He wouldn’t say pot when he was talking about marijuana. And maybe it’s intergenerational, but it’s also because he’s a cop and that’s part of their lingo.
Yeah, I would say dope.
Yeah.
Whoops. No, but so it could be intergenerational, but it might be the opposite of what you think as well. People who are using dope for marijuana might have a deeper kind of repository of the variety of meanings of dope and not just the one.
Gotcha. It’s kind of complicated. You know, there is one really great example of another word that’s made a transformation, and this one’s even a more thorough transformation than dope. And this is the word stoned. For you, what does stoned mean?
High.
High as a kite.
High on what?
Gosh.
Yeah, marijuana.
Marijuana, right. But to people primarily born before 1970, it meant drunk.
Really?
Yeah, stoned used to mainly mean drunk. And somewhere in the late 60s, early 70s, it started transforming. Now stoned mainly means high on marijuana. And so we do find this is really common with slang words. They do transform. They’re not as sticky. Their meanings tend to be more flexible. They tend to pass through the brain and take on new nuance depending on the group, depending on the person.
Tyson, I’m curious, what do you call marijuana?
Weed or pot.
Weed or pot. Mostly weed.
Weed or pot. What about grass?
Yeah, no, not really.
What about trees?
Well, only on the Internet.
Only on the Internet, okay.
Trees? Wait, fill me in here.
Trees. Marijuana, trees. Do you smoke trees or do you? It’s a lot. It’s kind of like 420. It’s a little bit of a code for marijuana.
Oh, okay. So you can use it in a variety of contexts.
Okay. We’re going to get some trees. You might not say I smoke trees. We might talk about having trees. My new girlfriend is an arborist.
No. Something like that.
No. Okay. Just wondered.
But it is one of the ways to circle this conversation around and try to wrap this up. What we’re really talking about here is how we use language to decide who is included in our group and who is excluded. And in your mind, people who say dope and mean marijuana are kind of not a part of your group. And you found a way to distinguish that. We do this with so many words, and slang in particular is prone to this. This is how we decide who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s in, who’s out, who’s cool, who’s square. Who’s high, who’s not. You don’t sound high, Tyson. Thanks for calling straight instead of high. Thank you so much.
All right. Appreciate it. Take care.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
