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."

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody please tag this "obvious".

Re:Wow

[RogL]

I smoke a ton of weed and wouldn't care if they made baby food out of it, but it can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people.

Everyday life can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people.
So can odd noises, squirrels, religion and the voices that only they hear.

Re:Wow

[Larryish]

Don't even get me started about the day the squirrel went berserk.

I remember it well.

We were in the First Self-Righteous Church, in the sleepy little town of Pascagoula...

Re:Wow

[quenda]

The "Elephant in the room" is caffeine. Why is society not prepared to deal with this menace, that makes drugs socially acceptable from an early age?
99% of heroin addicts admit to having used caffeine in some form before they were sixteen.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people.

Being a daily user of over 10 years (both illegally and now legally) and having suffered a triggered psychotic episode, the problem is certain people like myself can be very sensitive to high THC levels. Many grower-bred strains, particularly Sativas, are bred for high THC levels as it's an active, energetic high and can be very pleasant. However, under the right conditions and a vulnerable individual, it can cause severe anxiety, racing thoughts (exacerbated even by paranoia of doing something illegal) and even outright delusions. Another substance in marijuana is CBD, which has the opposite effect, and is more prevalent in Indicas. Research has actually shown it to act as an antipsychotic, neuroprotectant, inhibit tumor growth in both brain and lung cancers, and generally makes you feel sleepy and sedated. On the street, you generally never know the levels in what you are getting, and even at some dispensaries, unless you know the strain and the of THC and CBD of that family. If you get a THC dominant strain and a vulnerable individual uses it, yes, it can trigger a psychotic episode. That said, now that I have access to safe, reliable and professionally grown marijuana where I know exactly the contents of strains, I can choose carefully and it has worked wonders for my chronic pain and anxiety.

Additional story tag

[Deep Esophagus]

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).

Re:Additional story tag

[cusco]

If you follow the money very far you'll find that the banking industry is one of the most opposed to rationalizing drug laws, and it's not hard to figure out why. Money laundering, a.k.a. "private banking" is one of the most lucrative sectors of the financial services industry, with fees averaging 10-15 percent for mostly automated transactions. The US is the world's largest money laundry, with over $1,000,000,000,000 (yeah, a trillion dollars) being laundered here every year, about half of it being related to drugs and the rest to frauds, tax cheats, weapons, etc. How happy would the financial services industry be with their pet congresscritters if $50-$75 billion in almost pure profit were to evaporate? It's so lucrative that Clinton's Treasury Secretary went directly from "public service" to running the private banking branch of CitiCorp, one of the world's biggest money launderers, where he engineered the takeover of BanaMex (a.k.a. 'the drug smuggler's bank of choice') and its extremely valuable customer list.

I highly recommend Catherine Austin Fitts's three-part series called "NarcoDollars for Beginners" found on the Narconews.com web site (it's also mirrored all over, without permission, as "NarcoDollars for Dummies").

"Gateway" theory is still irrelevant

[wicka_wicka]

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.

It is obvious to the educated

[euroq]

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.

Re:Thank you, Captain Obvious.

[roc97007]

Which doesn't necessarily mean that alcohol is some magic gateway drug, (correlation does not imply causation) but that people with substance abuse problems naturally gravitate first to legal (and hence more easily acquirable) substances.

Which reminds me...

[roc97007]

...I really could use a drink.

the reason is racism, exoticism, fear of unknown

[circletimessquare]

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:

The first group of states to have marijuana laws in that part of the century were Rocky Mountain and southwestern states. By that, I mean Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana. You didn't have to go anywhere but to the legislative records to find out what had motivated those marijuana laws. The only thing you need to know to understand the early marijuana laws in the southwest and Rocky Mountain areas of this country is to know, that in the period just after 1914, into all of those areas was a substantial migration of Mexicans. They had come across the border in search of better economic conditions, they worked heavily as rural laborers, beet field workers, cotton pickers, things of that sort. And with them, they had brought marijuana.

          Basically, none of the white people in these states knew anything about marijuana, and I make a distinction between white people and Mexicans to reflect a distinction that any legislator in one of these states at the time would have made. And all you had to do to find out what motivated the marijuana laws in the Rocky mountain and southwestern states was to go to the legislative records themselves. Probably the best single statement was the statement of a proponent of Texas’ first marijuana law. He said on the floor of the Texas Senate, and I quote, "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff (referring to marijuana) is what makes them crazy." Or, as the proponent of Montana's first marijuana law said, (and imagine this on the floor of the state legislature) and I quote, "Give one of these Mexican beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bullring at Barcelona."

http://www.druglibrary.org/olsen/dpf/whitebread05.html

Re:duh

[Anne_Nonymous]

I was sober the first time I ever tried alcohol.

Re:gateway

[JaredOfEuropa]

Even so, to label something a "gateway drug", you'll have to show a causal relationship, or at least examine the correlation under different conditions.

Case in point: in my home country of the Netherlands, marihuana is (semi-)legal and freely available. Guess what: while there are more people in the Netherlands who have at some point tried marihuana (per capita), the number of regular users is actually lower than in the USA. Furthermore, we do not have a significantly higher number of users of hard drugs either. Which makes sense: the American pushing pot is breaking the law at the risk of a stiff prison sentence. He'll be more likely to cheerfully sell you something more potent as well. In the Netherlands, licensed coffee shop proprietors enjoy a legal and profitable trade in soft drugs; they are unlikely to risk all that by selling hard drugs on the side (besides, they are checked on a regular basis).

It's not the drug itsef that's the gateway to the nastier stuff. It's the person that is selling it to you. Legalising soft drugs doesn't mean allowing a gateway drug into the hands of your youngsters, it means that you're controlling the gateway and making it less likely that kids come into contact with hard drugs.

Re:duh

[Archangel Michael]

Sobriety, the gateway drug to all the others!

Re:duh

[Anne_Nonymous]

Well, believe me, I won't make that mistake again.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.