Study Confirms Marijuana is No Gateway Drug
December 5th, 2006 by Alex
Books like this belong in a landfill.
A complex study has just been wrapped up at the University of Pittsburgh. Researchers gathered 12 years worth of data on 214 boys, all of whom eventually used some type of drug (legal or illegal). Ranging from ages 10-12 all the way until age 22, you can imagine the wealth of information that was cultivated from this study.
The overall goal was to determine whether marijuana was a gateway drug and to also chart the patterns of different types of drug usage. The result? Marijuana is no more of a gateway drug than cigarettes or alcohol. The interesting thing is what’s called the ‘Gateway Sequence’ and ‘Reverse Sequence’. Meaning, boys who started out drinking or smoking cigarettes were just as likely to move on to marijuana and other drugs as boys who started with marijuana before anything else.
Here’s a quote from Ralph Tarter, Ph.D., lead author of the study:
The gateway progression may be the most common pattern, but it’s certainly not the only order of drug use. In fact, the reverse pattern is just as accurate for predicting who might be at risk for developing a drug dependence disorder.
The belief that marijuana is a gateway drug to much worse substances has been a corner-stone of governmental policy towards narcotics. Hopefully, the continuing amount of hard data that disproves politicians half-baked theories will start to alter the playing field.
So what is the most important deciding factor towards progression of drug use and what types of drugs are used? Your neighborhood. Your parents. Your peers. These are the real things that dictate who does drugs. If kids in the neighborhood smoke crack, there’s a higher chance you will too. If parents aren’t involved in a child’s early life, they’ll turn to other sources for comfort.
This all comes back to the broken windows theory. If the little problems are dealt with first, and a good environment is provided, non-recreational drugs will be avoided. People don’t just magically start smoking rock because it exists and now’s the time for society to address the base problems of usage instead of the assumed problems.
[via University of Pittsburgh - School of Pharmacology]
