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Study Finds Alcohol, Not Marijuana, Is the Biggest Gateway Drug For Teens
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study out of the University of Florida which found that alcohol is the biggest "gateway" drug, the use of which increases the likelihood of other drug use. Quoting:
"In the sample of students, alcohol also represented the most commonly used substance, with 72.2 percent of students reporting alcohol consumption at some point in their lifetime. Comparatively, 45 percent of students reported using tobacco, and 43.3 percent cited marijuana use. In addition, the drug use documented found that substance use typically begins with the most socially acceptable drugs, such as alcohol and cigarettes, then proceeds to marijuana use and finally to other illegal, harder drugs. Moreover, the study showed that students who used alcohol exhibited a significantly greater likelihood — up to 16 times — of licit and illicit substance use."
Somebody please tag this "obvious".
Who goes straight from the soda pop to the joint? That's pretty messed up. It's like a board game. First you. Must land on the bud light square, then the tequila square, and probably the abusing prescription drugs square.
I was drunk first time I ever smoked.
This should be tagged #noshitsherlock. Seriously, the only reason pot is demonized is because the tobacco and booze industries own too many politicians (and vice-versa).
Anyone who's grown up around people with substance abuse problems already knows this. Everyone I know with drug issues started out with alcohol issues.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
studies also show that nearly 100% of hardcore drug users have previously tried water before moving on. the connection is there is no such thing as a gateway drug but every hysterical person on the planet seems to believe that there is.
The idea of a specific drug being a "gateway" to others is incredibly misleading. Alcohol and weed are the obvious places to start because they're the easiest to obtain. You're going to get to harder drugs eventually if you're that type of person, but no one is just going to start at heroin.
hi
It may be obvious that marijuana is relatively safe to anyone who actually knows about marijuana and alcohol, or cares to research it, but it isn't to those who don't. People who don't know about it are bombarded with media from the war on drugs and conservatives on how bad marijuana is. They really think smoking pot actually does cause harm to those around them, and it should be easy to understand why, with all of the top-down deception happening in the U.S. and other countries.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Science is all about formulating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, performing it, and drawing reasonable conclusions which shape new hypotheses. We shouldn't be saying "WELL DUH," as if they shouldn't have bothered to do the study. Instead we should be happy that we have one more sample of interesting data than we had yesterday.
Also, this isn't the smoking gun that anti-prohibition activists might want. One potential conclusion is that prohibition is working, and that logically we should go ahead and outlaw alcohol and tobacco as well to prevent even more teens from becoming filthy marihuana smokers prone to reefer madness.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
the gapeway to addiction
Is that like being addicted to goatse? If so, then no thank you!
granddaddy's granddaddy was a proper wifebeating drunk in ireland or germany. alcohol is a familiar. therefore it's ok
meanwhile, look at these mexicans and their loco weed! scary otherness! outlaw that stuff!
seriously. this is the reason marijuana is illegal in the usa:
http://www.druglibrary.org/olsen/dpf/whitebread05.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also 1920s: “Makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” —H.J. Anslinger, Bureau of Narcotics
http://www.uccs.edu/~rmelamed/Physics%20of%20Life/Homepage/Marijuana%20and%20Racism.html
The only reason the hard drugs exist is because of prohibition. If you have a black market you want the product to be as potent and easily concealable/transportable as possible. Back in prohibition times most alcohol was as high of a percentage as was easy to distill. The same with coke and heroin. Chewing Coca leaves or making tea are the preferred method of consumption in the south american countries where it is grown and legal. Smoking Opium is preferred over shooting heroin. In the US Caffeine is preferred in beverages. If caffeine was made illegal you can bet there would be a black market for it as a concentrated powder or pill. The reason it's easier to OD on hard drugs is due in part to how concentrated they are and how irregular the concentration of active pharmaceutic is.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Over a decade ago, I used to get my weed through a guy who wasn't yet 21. He was dealing to pay to go to college without having to hold down a job at the same time. Every time I'd go to pick up from him (and I found he did this to several other over-21 clients as well), he made us go to the liquor store and buy him beer as part of his payment. His mother knew he was dealing, and why so many people came around, but I think she had decided that was better than joining a gang or failing his classes because he was working all night flipping burgers. She also didn't seem to have a problem with him drinking, but she refused to buy alcohol for him. (She did, however, smoke his weed.)
There was another guy who I bought from, who liked to shoot the rats that ran across the cables outside his balcony. Since it was just a BB gun, all it ever did was knock the rats off the wire. It was only about a 10 foot drop, and they'd bounce off the ground and climb back up again. Then he'd shoot them again.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Goatse addiction-now that's an illness that I hope nobody else has to go through.
A couple years ago some of my "friends told me about this nasty website called goatse. They told me to never go there because no amount of brain bleach will make you unsee it. So I avoided it. Whenever I saw a suspicious link I left it alone so as to keep my mind pure. Yet all this time I spent wondering how something could be so disgusting that it would be unforgettable.
One day I broke. I was bored. There was nothing on TV. My favorite message boards were dead. I was about to go insane from the lack of anything to do. Then the thought popped into my head "why not go look at goatse; it can't be THAT bad." Initially I resisted. My friends had warned me well, but eventually I broke. I slowly typed goatse.cx into my browser bar trembling with fear and anticipation. When the page loaded I was horrified. It was even worse than my friends said. I found myself retching because it was so repulsive. Yet I could not tear my eyes away There was something hypnotizing about that distended rectum with hands gripping the sides.
Soon I was spending hours a day on that site doing nothing but staring into that gaping maw. I could not figure out why, but I was hooked on it. The hole had me transfixed. Before long I started adorning my possessions with goatse paraphernalia. While I hid it initially from my friends and family, once I started doing that they knew. Slowly they started to drift away from me one by one. Eventually the only person I saw was my roommate, and that was rarely. After some time I walked back to my computer to gaze at the spread buttocks for several hours when I found my roommate blocking access to my computer. He looked me squarely in the eyes and said "You've got a problem." Initially I protested, but deep down I knew he was right, so after a heated discussion I deleted all the images off my hard drive, peeled the stickers off the lid of my laptop and took the posters down from the walls.
I've been goatse-free for three years now and I do not want to revisit that part of my life ever again.
Legalizing doesn't make the psychosis go away. In the Netherlands it's legal and there are plenty of fucked up people smoking themselves into an even more fucked up state, instead of dealing with their crap and getting on with their life without smoking.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Weeks, yes, months, no.
A study at Harvard found no significant effects on memory, etc. after quitting for 28 days.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/10.11/marijuana.html
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Even though there might be a slight drop in what some might perceive as "short term memory" (more like: verbal memory), there are also huge gains in other areas, i.e. creativity. The overall effect is a gain in intelligence and mental ability, not the opposite.
That is exactly what alcoholics say, you know.
I'm all in favour of heavy drinking and drug use, but to pretend they give you enhanced insight, creativity or whatever is really just a load of bollocks.
Get someone to record your drunk or drug-fuelled ideas and then play them back to you when you're sober. If you're Ernest Hemingway or Jimi Hendrix, you might possibly have some gold amongst the dross, but that's only because you're an artist to start with. Most people will just have dross, which is fine as long as they're not kidding themselves it's anything else.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it