Quote:
Originally Posted by MathGeek
The journal articles seem to conflict on whether or not cannabis is a gateway drug. It sure seemed to work that way for a number of my relatives as well as friends and acquaintances in high school. One day they are smoking a bit of pot, then down the road they are dropping out of school and impacted by the harder stuff.
Whether or not marijuana is truly a gateway drug for individual abusers, it does seem like libertarians are using it as a gateway drug in their legalization strategy: legalize cannabis now, then push for legalization of "harder" drugs later.
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I agree that the journal articles are slightly conflicting, I view this as a natural result of attempting to "prove" that cannabis is not a gateway drug. There are always going to be associations between cannabis, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, meth, etc. Because a human being will possibly choose to imbide / use more than one of those at a time.
However what is clearly shown, is that there is no "gateway" from one leading to the other. In point of fact based on the study on alcohol, even though it has a much higher comparative rate of association between alcohol use and various "harder" drug use. The researcher correctly goes on to define that this is still not a gateway.
Additionally, I am not the libertarian party, I happen to call myself a Libertarian, and I happen to agree with most of their viewpoints. Earlier in this discussion we discussed the results of Portugals 12 years of de-criminalizing of all drugs, I stated then that a case could be made that this would be the way to actually go. If you choose to be results oriented then it's quite easy to agree with that, basically rates of addiction for all drugs (hard, soft) have dropped dramatically. Whether this was a combination of drugs becoming "uncool" & effective repairs to how the state systemically handled abusers... I don't know.
Before legalizing / de-criminalizing hard drugs here in the states, this certainly is an area which begs of more non biased study, to find out how best to minimize their use. While we are doing that, we should also be looking at / conducting studies on the current legal abuse of various opiate based drugs. I suspect that once we stop criminalizing drug use, once we address some of the systemic issues, once we have the government / free market undercut the dealers / cartel's money base we will see the same reduction in overall drug use as Portugal has in the last 12 years.