The Great Gateway Theory

Smoke pot, shoot smack?The Great Gateway Hypothesis has had a long, controversial run as a central tenet of American anti-drug campaigns. As put forth by Denise B. Kandell of Columbia University and others in 1975, and refined and redefined ever since, the gateway theory essentially posits that soft drugs like alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana—particularly marijuana—make users more likely to graduate to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. What is implied is that gateway drugs cause users to move to harder drugs, by some unknown mechanism. The gateway theory forms part of the backbone of the War on Drugs. By staying tough on marijuana use, policy makers believe they will have much broader impacts on hard drug use down the road.This notion is virtually an article of faith in the drug prevention community. It just feels intuitively right: Scratch a junkie, and you’ll find a younger, embryonic pot smoker or furtive teenage drinker. Ergo, prevent teen pot smoking, and you will block the blossoming of a multitude of future hard drug addicts. For years, the gateway hypothesis has had its share of contentious opponents. The countervailing theory is known primarily as CLA, for Common Liability to Addiction, the genetically based approach that lines up with the notion of addiction as a chronic disease entity. Most genetic association studies have failed to record risk variations for addiction that are specific to one addictive drug. Writing in 2012 in Drug and A...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs