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respect meaning that they can smoke as hard as a man and maintain a dignity of conversation and behavior. They can smoke ganja and reason with men, have debates about serious topics like politics and religion. They are considered to be principled women who are astute and trustworthy. Another characteristic of these women is they tend to be economically independent and resourceful. fhe y don't expect that men will have the sole burden of supporting households. Many of these women are working for themselves, and a significant number of them are involved in ganja sales, along with work such as farming and other commercial enterprises. They build their own houses and become less dependent on men, or on one man, for their livelihood. Part of this change came from Rastafarianism, because Rasta women do smoke ganja chronically as par[ of their religious rituals. Older women have built up their roles as ganja administrators, while older men may have to decrease their ganja use once their days in the fields are over. The society is changing experience with ganja is changing, and women smokers are becoming more visible then before. Give us a general overview of the studies you've done on ganja use during pregnancy When [noticed that increasing numbers of women were smoking marijuana, I decided to study prenatal marijuana exposure and its effects on children. Most of the studies done in North America had serious confounds and results which just did not hold up under scrutiny. We did ethnographic studies which examined the lifestyles of mothers who used ganja and mothers who didn't use ganja, and compared behavioral characteristics of neonates from both groups in the first month of life. We later went back and looked at the children with afive-year follow-up study. How did your studies differ from other studies? Up to that point, most studies which examined marijuana use during pregnancy were flawed by serious methodological problems. They couldn't control for so many variables, and the negative effects they blamed on marijuana could well have been caused by other things. My studies are among the few which actually measured how much ganja a woman has consumed. I wasn't sitting in a clinic somewhere divorced from women's lives asking them how much marijuana they'd used - my research team is in a community and in the Feld where we can observe these women and check out their reports. We know how much ganja, and what type and potency, they are consuming. We had ways of verifying the amount of ganja they consume; neighbors would come and tell us what was going on, so we could compare that to _ what we had been told by the mother We had a setting in which we knew that the women were only exposed to marijuana. In most North American studies the women were using all kinds of drugs like alcohol, tobacco, speed and cocaine during prenatal studies, and there was no way for the researchers to know what or how much. We knew what our test subjects were doing and this gave extra credibility to our work. A lot of media publicity had been given to US studies which purported to show that marijuana caused birth defects or serious developmental problems, but most of this research involved participants who were multi-drug users who had a terrible social support network that probably caused the problems. Instead, these problems were blamed on marijuana. 4