When you make pot users walk through the "illegal drugs" gateway, are you surprised they come into contact with illegal drugs?
All together now, and with gusto: “The gateway drug theory is a myth!”
(PubMed, US Nat’l Institutes of Health) BACKGROUND: It is unclear whether the normative sequence of drug use initiation, beginning with tobacco and alcohol, progressing to cannabis and then other illicit drugs, is due to causal effects of specific earlier drug use promoting progression, or to influences of other variables such as drug availability and attitudes. One way to investigate this is to see whether risk of later drug use in the sequence, conditional on use of drugs earlier in the sequence, changes according to time-space variation in use prevalence. We compared patterns and order of initiation of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and other illicit drug use across 17 countries with a wide range of drug use prevalence.
METHOD: Analyses used data from World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys, a series of parallel community epidemiological surveys using the same instruments and field procedures carried out in 17 countries throughout the world.
RESULTS: Initiation of “gateway” substances (i.e. alcohol, tobacco and cannabis) was differentially associated with subsequent onset of other illicit drug use based on background prevalence of gateway substance use. Cross-country differences in substance use prevalence also corresponded to differences in the likelihood of individuals reporting a non-normative sequence of substance initiation.
CONCLUSION: These results suggest the “gateway” pattern at least partially reflects unmeasured common causes rather than causal effects of specific drugs on subsequent use of others. This implies that successful efforts to prevent use of specific “gateway” drugs may not in themselves lead to major reductions in the use of later drugs.
The only gateway between marijuana and the use of harder drugs is that gateway labeled “illegal drug users go this way” that the government pushes you through if you’re using cannabis. You know why they don’t call tequila a gateway drug? Because people who use tequila can’t buy heroin on the same shelf as tequila! Because people who use tequila aren’t considered “druggies”. Because when someone tries tequila for the first time, most of what they have been told about it turns out to be true, and they don’t think “well, they lied about tequila, they must have been lying about cocaine, too!” Because people who use tequila don’t figure “well, I guess I’ve already tried ‘drugs’, I may as well try some others.”
If sugar and caffeine were considered illegal drugs (and I can make a better argument for banning them than cannabis, not that I would), you can damn sure bet that Mountain Dew would be considered a gateway drug. After all, that’s the first addictive substance I ever got hooked on (and it’s done more health damage to me than cannabis ever will!)