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Pittsburgh NORML
Gateway Theory Busted

No 'smoking' gun -- Research
indicates teen marijuana use
does not predict drug, alcohol
abuse
PITTSBURGH, Dec. 4 -- Marijuana is not a ―gateway‖ drug that predicts or
eventually leads to substance abuse, suggests a 12-year University of
Pittsburgh study. Moreover, the study’s findings call into question the longheld belief that has shaped prevention efforts and governmental policy for six
decades and caused many a parent to panic upon discovering a bag of pot in
their child’s bedroom.
The Pitt researchers tracked 214 boys beginning at ages 10-12, all of whom
eventually used either legal or illegal drugs. When the boys reached age 22,
they were categorized into three groups: those who used only alcohol or
tobacco, those who started with alcohol and tobacco and then used
marijuana (gateway sequence) and those who used marijuana prior to
alcohol or tobacco (reverse sequence).
Nearly a quarter of the study population who used both legal and illegal drugs
at some point – 28 boys – exhibited the reverse pattern of using marijuana
prior to alcohol or tobacco, and those individuals were no more likely to
develop a substance use disorder than those who followed the traditional

Marijuana as a Gateway Drug:
The Myth That Will Not Die
Of all the arguments that have been used to demonize marijuana, few have
been more powerful than that of the ―gateway effect‖: the notion that while
marijuana itself may not be especially dangerous, it ineluctably leads to harder
drugs like heroin and cocaine. Even Nick Kristof — in a column favoring
marijuana legalization — alluded to it this week in the New York Times. In what
is known as the ―to be sure‖ paragraph, where op-ed writers cite the arguments
of opponents, he wrote:
I have no illusions about drugs. One of my childhood friends in Yamhill, Ore.,
pretty much squandered his life by dabbling with marijuana in ninth grade and
then moving on to stronger stuff. And yes, there’s some risk that legalization
would make such dabbling more common.
The idea that marijuana may be the first step in a longer career of drug use
seems plausible at first: when addicts tell their histories, many begin with a
story about marijuana. And there’s a strong correlation between marijuana use
and other drug use: a person who smokes marijuana is more than 104 times
more likely to use cocaine than a person who never tries pot, according to the
National Institute on Drug Abuse. (More on Time.com:7 Tips for California:
How to Make Legalizing Marijuana Smart)

The problem here is that correlation isn’t cause. Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang
members are probably more 104 times more likely to have ridden a bicycle as a
kid than those who don’t become Hell’s Angels, but that doesn’t mean that riding
a two-wheeler is a ―gateway‖ to joining a motorcycle gang. It simply means that
most people ride bikes and the kind of people who don’t are highly unlikely to
ever ride a motorcycle.
Scientists long ago abandoned the idea that marijuana causes users to try other
drugs: as far back as 1999, in a report commissioned by Congress to look at the
possible dangers of medical marijuana, the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academy of Sciences wrote:
Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly
regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably
the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other
illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol
and nicotine before marijuana — usually before they are of legal age.
In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation
of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a ―gateway‖ drug. But because underage
smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the
most common, and is rarely the first, ―gateway‖ to illicit drug use. There is no
conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the
subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.

Since then, numerous other studies have
failed to support the gateway idea. Every
year, the federal government funds two
huge surveys on drug use in the
population. Over and over they find that the
number of people who try marijuana dwarfs
that for cocaine or heroin. For example, in
2009, 2.3 million people reported trying pot
— compared with 617,000 who tried
cocaine and 180,000 who tried heroin.
(More on Time.com: See photos of
cannabis conventions)
So what accounts for the massive
correlation between marijuana use and use
of other drugs? One key factor is taste.
People who are extremely interested in
altering their consciousness are likely to
want to try more than one way of doing it. If
you are a true music fan, you probably
won’t stick to listening to just one band or
even a single genre — this doesn’t make
lullabies a gateway to the Grateful Dead, it
means that people who really like music
probably like many different songs and

Second is marijuana’s illegality: you aren’t likely to be able to find a heroin dealer
if you can’t even score weed. Compared with pot dealers, sellers of hard drugs
tend to be even less trusting of customers they don’t know, in part because they
face greater penalties. But if you’ve proved yourself by regularly purchasing
marijuana, dealers will happily introduce to you to their harder product lines if you
express interest, or help you find a friend of theirs who can.
Holland began liberalizing its marijuana laws in part to close this particular
gateway — and indeed now the country has slightly fewer young pot-smokers
who move on to harder drugs compared with other nations, including the U.S. A
2010 Rand Institute report titled ―What Can We Learn from the Dutch Cannabis
Coffeeshop Experience?‖ found that there was ―some evidence‖ for a ―weakened
gateway‖ in The Netherlands, and concluded that the data ―clearly challenge any
claim that the Dutch have strengthened the gateway to hard drug use.‖ (More on
Time.com:Is Marijuana Addictive? It Depends How You Define Addiction)
Of course, that’s not the gateway argument favored by supporters of our current
drug policy — but it is the one supported by science.

Safety for Use: Cannabis as a
Gateway Drug
Recent research suggests that recreationally used cannabis does not act as
a gateway drug to harder drugs such as alcohol, cocaine and heroine. The
same will apply to users of medicinal cannabis.
Several research studies addressed the question whether cannabis leads to
the use of harder drugs such as alcohol, cocaine and heroin.
According to a study to be published by the Centre for Economic Policy
Research, London, cannabis does not lead to the use of hard drugs (Sunday
Times of 16 December 2001). Findings are based on a survey of drug users
in Amsterdam over a 10-year period. The study by Jan van Ours of Tilburg
University in the Netherlands shows that cannabis users typically start using
the drug between the ages of 18 and 20, while cocaine use usually starts
between 20 and 25. But it concludes that cannabis is not a stepping stone to
using cocaine or heroin. Four surveys, covering nearly 17,000 people, were
carried out in Amsterdam in 1987, 1990, 1994 and 1997. The study found that
there was little difference in the probability of an individual taking up cocaine
as to whether or not he or she had used cannabis. Although significant
numbers of people in the survey did use soft and hard drugs, this was linked
with personal characteristics and a predilection to experimentation.

The Institute of Medicine study characterized marijuana’s role as a ―gateway
drug‖ as follows:
"Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are
strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is
predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most
users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users
begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana—usually before they are of
legal age.
In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation
of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a "gateway" drug. But because underage
smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the
most common, and is rarely the first, "gateway" to illicit drug use. There is no
conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to
the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs. An important caution is that data on
drug use progression cannot be assumed to apply to the use of drugs for
medical purposes. It does not follow from those data that if marijuana were
available by prescription for medical use, the pattern of drug use would remain
the same as seen in illicit use" (Joy et al. 1999)
A more recent study based on national survey data also does not support the
hypothesis that increases in marijuana use lead to increased use of more
dangerous drugs among the general public. In the American Journal of Public
Health, Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson of the National Development and
Research Institute in New York wrote that young people who smoked
marijuana in the generations before and after the baby boomers do not appear

The recent increase in youthful marijuana use has been offset by lower rates of
progression to hard drug use among youths born in the 1970s. Dire predictions of
future hard drug abuse by youths who came of age in the 1990s may be greatly
overstated‖ (Golub& Johnson 2001).
Research also suggests that the ―gateway theory‖ does not describe the behavior
of serious drug users:
―The serious drug users were substantially different from high school samples in
their progression of drug use. The serious drug users were less likely to follow the
typical sequence identified in previous studies (alcohol, then marijuana, followed by
other illicit drugs). They were more likely to have used marijuana before using
alcohol, and more likely to have used other illicit drugs before using marijuana. We
also found that atypical sequencing was associated with earlier initiation of the use
of illicit drugs other than marijuana and greater lifetime drug involvement. These
findings suggest that for a large number of serious drug users, marijuana does not
play the role of a 'gateway drug'. We conclude that prevention efforts which focus
on alcohol and marijuana may be of limited effectiveness for youth who are at risk
for serious drug abuse‖ (Mackesy-Amiti et al. 1997)

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