Replies

The studies on early alcohol use show a massive correlation between age at onset of use and lifelong alocholism. I expect if they ran the alcohol studies on twins, they'd confirm it's a causative factor as well.

The simple fact is that the years from adolescence through early adulthood are the primary period of learning emotional coping skills. Those who begin using mind-altering substances during this period, to deal with stress, anxiety, depression, etc., are cheating their way out of the difficult process of learning emotional coping skills, i.e. they aren't using the mind-altering substances in addition to all the normal developmental processes of adolesecence and early adulthood, they're using them INSTEAD of a key one of those processes. In addition, their substance abuse generally ensures that they fall in with a peer group which is also skipping the normal process of emotional development. They then arrive at the greater stresses of adulthood without those skills and, as much neurological research has shown, with much less malleable brains than younger people -- for those reasons, it's extremely difficult to catch up on learning the coping skills past college age.

Too bad our society isn't ready to face the fact that alcohol is a major "gateway" drug too -- and probably a much bigger one than marijuana.