The Fear of Gateway Drugs

This analysis suggests, however, that it is less the ferment of the gateway dose than of the friends using that dose as to whether the one-on-one expenditures either the gateway drug or any harder drug.

marijuana has been identified by many authorities as the most significant gateway drug, merely it is to a fault a drug that has been losing influence:

Marijuana has been widely feared as the "gateway drug" that leads teenagers from weed joints to experimenting with stronger stuff, such as cocaine and heroin. In 1978, harmonise to government surveys, a staggering 10 percent of both high shallow seniors smoked marijuana every day. today the percentage has dropped by half. That is still way too high, but attitudes have changed markedly. Only onequarter of high school seniors reported that marijuana was a dangerous drug in 1978, but now fully 75 percent do (Thomas 60).

At the same time, while the government continues to operate as if marijuana were a gateway drug, many researchers disagree and arrest that some claims undercut the drug war:

Like the oncecommon insistence that steroids do not help athletes spate up, the oftrepeated lie that marijuana is some attractive of deadly poison leads people--especially young people--to suspect all suggestions that drugs may be dangerous. It's har

Postrel cites Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar in a 1995 editorial in The journal of the American checkup Association:

Tobacco and marijuana have been condemned in take apart because they supposedly lead to the use of other drugs. The psychiatric groundbreaker Benjamin Rush offered an early version of the "gateway" possibility in 1798 when he said chewing or smoking tobacco contributed to alcoholism by creating a peculiar kind of thirst: This thirst cannot be allayed by water, for no tranquillizing or even insipid liquor will be relished after the mouth and throat have been exposed to the input signal of the smoke, or juice of Tobacco.

A desire of course is elicit for strong drinks, and these when taken between meals soon lead to indulgence and drunkenness (Sullum 42).

In 1912, Charles B. Towns took the notion a step further, express tobacco leads to alcohol, and alcohol leads to morphine.

Morrison, Martha A., "Addiction in Adolescents," The Western Journal of Medicine (May 1990), pp. 543-546.

Jenkins, Jeanne E. "The Influence of Peer Affiliation and Student Activities on Adolescent Drug Involvement." Adolescence (June 1, 1996), 297-306.

Formulations of this kind obscure two polar points: First, most marijuana users never even try some other illegal drug, let alone use it regularly. Second, it is not full to conclude from the fact that marijuana users are more than likely to use heroin or cocaine that marijuana use results in heroin or cocaine use. (It is probably also true that adults who wear jeans more than three days a week and people who ride motorcycles without a helmet are more likely to try heroin or cocaine.) In this vitrine as in so many others, antidrug polemicists tend to confuse correlation with causation (Sullum 43).

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