Someone better explain that to Google and Bing.
Almost every Page One link for "Gateway Drug" includes the word alcohol.
I bring up the issue because Free Republic has many passionate supporters who think marijuana should be banned, but no one who thinks alcohol should be banned.
However, most people who move on to hard drugs used alcohol before they used marijuana.
The most successful culture on earth, Western Civilization has used alcohol for thousands of years and it made for all sorts of socialization and community through bars, fine dining, restaurants, socializing, large gatherings, celebrations, inns and so on but during those thousands of years they avoided Marijuana as an intoxicant although they knew about it, ancient Greece and Rome and so on never adopted it as an intoxicant, and even during the Crusades it was condemned, not until just in the last 60 years or so has cannabis and the drug culture fully penetrated into the white world in this massive way.
Now look at the regions of the world that did adopt cannabis and hash as an intoxicant thousands of years ago, there is a remarkable resemblance to what we call the stoner’s world, grubby, lazy, introverted, art that they see as complex and detailed but that lacks the richness of Western art, basically the stoner’s world without TV and a couch, and look at the effects within the West during the last 60 years.