Nearly all high school have at least heard about marijuana and most have probably tried it. Was wondering if was the same in the 50s.
Yes, it would have been common for a hypothetical student anywhere in the United States to have known about cannabis. No, it would not have been common for them to have used it.
Several commenters have offered parts of a comprehensive answer in this thread, but they've been removed by other moderators because they didn't encompass an entire answer, didn't offer good, clear citations (YouTube does not count), were too short, or for other factors. Please do not share firsthand accounts, because we have no way to know you are who you say you are.
In any event, as /u/Enlightenment777 pointed out, "This type of question is too broad, because every community is different in the USA. Rural folk were exposed to terms in different ways than big city folk."
Rural juveniles, particularly white ones, would not have had easy access to marijuana, even if they had an interest in trying it. Marijuana use was largely (there are always some exceptions) confined to urban centers, particularly port cities or locations along the Mexican border. In the 1950s, narcotics use was seen (likely correctly) as a problem affecting predominantly non-white Americans. In the April 11, 1950 issue of the New York Times, Garland Williams of the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the New York Police Department declared that "addiction had risen about 10 per cent (since the end of WWII), with virtually all of the increase among teenagers in the Bronx."
A year later, Times reporter Charles Grutzner wrote, "The most dangerous form of juvenile delinquency ─ addiction to heroin and marijuana ─ has spread among New York's teen-agers to an extent that has frightened public officials, social and civic workers and parents."
The story quoted no formal statistics, however, and concluded that "Others ... believe that the situation, while deadly serious, has been numerically exaggerated." Later in 1951, NYC's superintendent of schools reported finding 154 cases of narcotics addiction in NYC schools, but he believed that when it came to users, there were were really about 1,500 cases ─ 1 in 200 high school students.
By modern standards, that's an extraordinarily small number, even if you use the superintendent's (likely inflated) figure. As /u/SecretAgentIceBat pointed out, "In my area, the DFW metroplex of Texas, only 38.2% of all 12th graders reported ever having consumed marijuana."
And high schoolers in New York City were likely to have better access to marijuana than most students. They lived in a port city with large numbers of immigrants, precisely the mix that we know from David Musto's The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control made up the seed-bed for large-scale narcotics use.
So, while we can conclude that use was low, what about knowledge?
That's a different story.
Starting in 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act, the United States began taking a hard line toward all narcotics and began considering addiction a crime, rather than a medical condition. In the 1930s, cannabis was effectively made illegal through the Marihuana Tax Act (of 1937), which required cannabis sales to have an extraordinarily expensive tax stamp that the federal government almost never issued. State laws backstopped that federal regulation, banning the cannabis trade almost entirely across the country at the state level.
As /u/Zulawski points out, the films Reefer Madness, Marihuana and The Assassin of Youth all date from this period and were intended to scare youths away from the use of cannabis. The attitudes that created these films did not die out by the 1950s; indeed, the federal government, state governments and various non-governmental organizations (including church groups) conducted strong anti-cannabis campaigns through the 1940s and 1950s. If you're a believer in the Streisand Effect, these campaigns might have spread knowledge of cannabis to youths who otherwise wouldn't have been aware of it.
Even without those anti-cannabis campaigns, cannabis was rapidly becoming a factor in the "alt" lifestyle, as Watson's The Birth of the Beat Generation mentions. William Burroughs and Joan Vollmer moved to Texas to raise vegetables and cannabis in 1947; Herbert Huncke joined them there. Books like On the Road (published in 1957, but inspired by a trip a decade earlier) made cannabis appear rebellious and attractive. That inspired some youths, and they in turn inspired others. By 1966, the Times was declaring that "Drugs (are) a growing campus problem" with over half of high school students in Berkeley experimenting with marijuana or heroin.
Edit: If you'd like to look at some raw data (and I mean REALLY raw), I've scanned the daily police department logs for Juneau, Alaska between 1953 and 1955, and you can see them here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o4cgqk31bxrfjpa/AACVePhbzdwx-eOcH8lyup2Ra?dl=0
I'll Paypal $5 to the first person who finds a reference to cannabis or marijuana in there. (Send me a PM.) I haven't found one, but it might be there.
Found on DSC_2858.JPG by /u/jparonson!
Also a followup question if i may: how frowned upon was it as compared to now or the hippie era?
I know of one survey that might help answer this question, and it's a retrospective one. The National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (which is a massive, ongoing survey that started in 1979) asks people when they first used various drugs, first drank, first smoked etc - and there are a couple of scholars who have analyzed the NHSDA data to get an estimate of historical drug use rates at different ages.
This study breaks it down in a table (on page 29). The numbers are low: for people who were high-school aged in the late 40s/early 50s only 1% or so reported having consumed marijuana by age 15, and only 2% reported having done so by age 21. For people who were high school aged in the late 50s/early 60s, the numbers jump a bit: still only 1% reported having smoked pot by age 15, but 6% reported having done so by age 21.
A quick look at some other sources suggests that other people's analyses of the NHSDA surveys have yielded similar results. This book, for example, suggests that the number of ''regular'' marijuana users below age 21 was extremely low until the late 1950s. See this table and this one.
In general, though, I would take this data with a grain of salt - people's memories are fallible and it's entirely possible that some people (especially those born in the 30s/40s) would under-state or not report marijuana use. Since this isn't something that was easily measured or tracked (particularly during the 1950s, when marijuana use was far more stigmatized than it is today), though, I'm skeptical that there are any other/better ways out there of getting an estimate. We could try looking at arrests or other crime reports, but that might tell us a lot more about enforcement than it does about actual usage.
In looking at congressional documents (which I at first thought might help answer your question), all I found was instances of experts wringing their hands over how it is "almost impossible to come up with a figure that would mean anything" for marijuana usage. This confusion lasts well into the 60s: the President's Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse (1963) lamented "existing information on drug abuse is pitifully inadequate. No one knows exactly how many drug abusers there really are in the United States," and the President's Commission on Law Enforcement (1967) stated categorically that "there is no reliable estimate of the prevalence of marijuana use." But both of those reports did suggest that anecdotally, and based on the number of drug arrests/charges, usage was on the rise during the early 60s (which is almost certainly accurate, and also why congressional committees were suddenly so interested in the subject at that time).
EDIT: This focuses on college rather than high school students, but here is an interesting source from 1967, in which Stanley Yolles (director of the National Institute of Mental Health) tells a congressional committee that:
Surveys of high school and college drug use indicate that approximately 20 percent of the college students questioned reported some experience with marihuana. It is estimated that about two million high school and college students have had some experience with marihuana. Generally more men students reported involvement. Of those who reported having ever used marihuana, 65 percent had used it less than ten times with "once or twice" the commonest response.
Yes, the entire report really does spell it "marihuana!" But that's in 1967, and we know that usage rates started climbing in the 60s, especially among college aged youth - so I don't think that necessarily disproves the lower, narrower estimates (for high school-age youth only) discussed above. Yolles appears to have got the 20% figure from the Gallup Poll, which first starting asking college students about drug use in 1967 - so take that (self-reported) figure with a bit of salt too.
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