Posted on 07/21/2006 5:34:00 AM PDT by Wolfie
Gateway to Nowhere?
The evidence that pot doesn't lead to heroin.
Earlier this month, professor Yasmin Hurd of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine released a study showing that rats exposed to the main ingredient in marijuana during their adolescence showed a greater sensitivity to heroin as adults. The wire lit up with articles announcing confirmation for the "gateway theory"—the claim that marijuana use leads to harder drugs.
It's a theory that has long seemed to make intuitive sense, but remained unproven. The federal government's last National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted in 2004, counted about 97 million Americans who have tried marijuana, compared to 3 million who have tried heroin (166,000 had used it in the previous month). That's not much of a rush through the gateway. And a number of studies have demonstrated that your chances of becoming an addict are higher if addiction runs in your family, or if heroin is readily available in your community, or if you're a risk-taker. These factors can account for the total number of heroin addicts, which could make the gateway theory superfluous.
On close inspection, Hurd's research, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, doesn't show otherwise. For the most part, it's a blow to the gateway theory. To be sure, Hurd found that rats who got high on pot as adolescents used more heroin once they were addicted. But she found no evidence that they were more likely to become addicted than the rats in the control group who'd never been exposed to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, marijuana's main ingredient.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Despite all efforts to deny that pot is a gateway, it will never be undone.
Too many families have lived through it, or lost kids or other loved ones through the gateway.
Can't bring myself to read it. Have they proven how many heroin users/addicts did NOT start as pot users?
Uncle Bob's Midnight Blues Lyrics
Artist: Randy Newman
Album: 12 Songs
Goin' down to the corner
Gonna have myself a drink
Goin' down to the corner
Gonna have myself a drink
'Cause that sh*t that we been usin'
Sure confuse my thinking
Gonna send out to the drugstore
Buy myself a goat
Tie him up in my front yard
For all my so-called friends to see
Ain't nobody gonna look in my window and laugh at me
I been up so long
That it looks like down to me
Please don't talk about to me when I'm gone
Baby, are you against me too?
Had a great idea the other night
Come-A-Ti-Yi-Yippie, baby
Look out
When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day
We love you
We love you
We love you
Funny how that was left out of the other articles.
Interesting -- and it confirms my suspicions.
Can't bring myself to read it.
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hey, don't tell me anything...I know what I know and that's all I know... and EVERYONE knows it's that umbilical juice that gives us the hunger for heroin...it has to be...it just has to be...(covering ears, closing eyes, jumping up and down).
How many heroin users started with beer? Chocolate? Cigarettes?
How many pot users become junkies? College graduates? Parents? Mere sequence of events does not prove correlation.
Biggest gateway drug of all is BEER
I would venture to say 99.9% of all addicts ( booze heroin-speed coke or what ever ) started out with BEER
Let's ban it
Exactly. And correlation does not prove causation.
Another case of "Liberaltarianism".
back to original question.
What research has been done to show how many heroin users did NOT start with pot.
Thank you for answering on topic.
Would I mind if I got new neighbors, and their skin was a dark shade of brown? Not at all! Do you think I'm a racist?? The color of a person's skin is of no consequence.
Would I mind if I got new neighbors, and they embraced the Ghetto Hip-Hop Urban Trash culture? You're darn right I'd mind. I'd say "There goes the neighborhood" and I'd make plans to move. My principle worry would be that my kids would be influenced by a ruinous sub-culture.
Chemical relationships between marijuana and heroin are of no interest to me at all. But the sub-culture that embraces marijuana can be a bad sub-culture. Some folks who start off in the shallow end and end up in the deep-end of the pool. The culture is what's dangerous.
This research of course would assume that pot is the starting place and would have to find situations where pot was not available but heroin was or any other substance that one things is the starting place. One could just as easily do some research based on any number of assumptions...e.g., heroin use starts with booze, heroin use starts with cigarettes, heroin use starts with anti-drug programs that create fascination about drugs, heroin use starts with bad studies. Assumptions are a poor way to initiate research and one does not prove the null hypothesis.
If one is predisposed to smoke pot, it seems it would follow that one may be predisposed to move onto other drugs..but then again maybe not.
I know a few potheads who are just that....potheads.
Actually, you have to go back one step further.
Carrots. Think about it. Everyone who has had a beer has eaten carrots BEFORE they had their first beer. So, if you want to get to the root of the problem, ban carrots.
There are many substances, certainly creating addiction or dependence, that all humans ingest. If all humans ingest them, then all heroin users, being human, have ingested these substances. Perhaps heroin users "start with" aspirin. Perhaps they "start with" sugar.
Where are your studies that beer, or sugar, or aspirin, or antacids, are not the "gateway drugs" that lead to heroin use? Don't their usages predate marijuana use? Perhaps one of them is the real culprit.
Sequence does not lead to correlation, and correlation, as noted, does NOT equal causation. You have to prove that marijuana use leads to heroin use. That is the scientific method.
Anything else is just ideology - ideas accepted as natural fact, but with scientific evidence to prove them.
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