Pubdate: Thu, 28 Dec 2006
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA)
Copyright: 2006 PG Publishing
Contact:  http://www.post-gazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/341
Author: Bruce Mirken
Note: Bruce Mirken is communications director for the Marijuana Policy
Project

PERSPECTIVES: MARIJUANA MYTH GETS BUSTED

It's Now Clear That Pot Doesn't Lead to Hard-Core Drug Use

Two recent studies should be the final nails in the coffin of the lie 
that has propelled some of this nation's most misguided policies: the 
claim that smoking marijuana somehow causes people to use hard drugs, 
often called the "gateway theory."

Such claims have been a staple of the White House Office of National 
Drug Control Policy under present drug czar John Walters. Typical is 
a 2004 New Mexico speech in which, according to the Albuquerque 
Journal, "Walters emphasized that marijuana is a 'gateway drug' that 
can lead to other chemical dependencies."

The gateway theory presents drug use as a tidy progression in which 
users move from legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco to marijuana, 
and from there to hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and 
methamphetamine. Thus, zealots like Mr. Walters warn, marijuana is 
bad because it leads to things that are even worse.

It's a neat theory, easy to sell. The problem is, scientists keep 
poking holes in it. The two new studies are just the most recent examples.

In one National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded study, researchers 
from the University of Pittsburgh tracked the drug use patterns of 
224 boys, starting at ages 10 to 12 and ending at age 22. Right from 
the beginning these kids confounded expectations. Some followed the 
traditional gateway paradigm, starting with tobacco or alcohol and 
moving on to marijuana, but some reversed the pattern, starting with 
marijuana first. And some never progressed from one substance to 
another at all.

When they looked at the detailed data on these kids, the researchers 
found that the gateway theory simply didn't hold; environmental 
factors such as neighborhood characteristics played a much larger 
role than which drug the boys happened to use first. "Abusable 
drugs," they wrote, "occupy neither a specific place in a hierarchy 
nor a discrete position in a temporal sequence."

Lead researcher Dr. Ralph E. Tarter told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 
"It runs counter to about six decades of current drug policy in the 
country, where we believe that if we can't stop kids from using 
marijuana, then they're going to go on and become addicts to hard drugs."

Researchers in Brisbane, Australia, and St. Louis reached much the 
same conclusion in a larger and more complex study published last 
month. The research involved more than 4,000 Australian twins whose 
use of marijuana and other drugs was followed in detail from 
adolescence into adulthood.

Then -- and here's the fascinating part -- they matched the 
real-world data from the twins to mathematical models based on 13 
different explanations of how use of marijuana and other illicit 
drugs might be related. These models ranged from pure chance -- 
assuming that any overlap between use of marijuana and other drugs is 
random -- to models in which underlying genetic or environmental 
factors lead to both marijuana and other drug use or models in which 
marijuana use causes use of other drugs or vice versa.

When they crunched the numbers, only one conclusion made sense: 
"Cannabis and other illicit drug use and misuse co-occur in the 
population due to common risk factors (correlated vulnerabilities) or 
a liability that is in part shared." Translated to plain English: The 
data don't show that marijuana causes use of other drugs, but instead 
indicate that the same factors that make people likely to try 
marijuana also make them likely to try other substances.

In the final blow to claims that marijuana must remain illegal to 
keep us from becoming a nation of hard-drug addicts, the researchers 
added that any gateway effect that does exist is "more likely to be 
social than pharmacological," occurring because marijuana "introduces 
users to a provider (peer or black marketeer) who eventually becomes 
the source for other illicit drugs." In other words, the gateway 
isn't marijuana; it's laws that put marijuana into the same criminal 
underground with speed and heroin.

The lie that marijuana somehow turns people into junkies is dead. 
Officials who insist on repeating it as a way of squelching 
discussion about common-sense reforms should be laughed off the stage.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine