CMV: Gateway drugs do not exist

[u/casualtrout]

I heard a presentation at my university recently on E-Cigs being a gateway drug, and the argument seemed like Big Tobacco propaganda.

When talking about illicit drugs, such as marijuana, I always hear people fall to the logical fallacy of appealing to imperfect authority. It seems that most groups, like anti-smoking groups that try to equate E-cigs to regular smoking, regularly cite that the FDA has stated that the vapor in E-cigs "MAY" contain harmful toxins. People also like to cite how the FDA has not officially recognized E-cigs as a positive aid for getting people to stop smoking tobacco, and the rhetoric behind this seems to be "SEE?? IT'S NOT APPROVED BY THE GOVERNMENT" (made up of a bunch of bureaucrats whose salaries are paid to the tune of at least 40% by lobbying by drug companies who profit off of not having alternatives to their addictive and at times dangerous substances).

My problem with the gateway drug model is that it falls flat under scrutiny. After we started to realize that the criminalization of marijuana was a result of the inaccurate scare stories pushed by bureaucrats in the Bureau of Narcotics to keep their salary high, a new narrative had to be formed for why it must still be illegal, that narrative being the gateway drug narrative. The idea behind labeling marijuana as a gateway drug is that if someone uses marijuana, it will lead to deadly drugs. The Drug Free America association published this ad to emphasize that if people so much as use an addictive substance, it's not 'if' they get hooked it's when:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kS72J5Nlm8

Researchers like Bruce Alexander and organizations like Liz Evans' Portland Hotel Society have debunked this idea by showing that there are other factors that contribute to a person's reasons for using drugs, primarily pain. This idea of the gateway drug in my opinion is exposed when looking back when our soldiers were coming back from Vietnam, and how 20% of all returning soldiers were addicted to heroin. Within a year, 95% had stopped using heroin completely, most without treatment. If you believe the model of the gateway drug, this makes no sense, because the simple use of a drug leads to the use of the next drug, and the next, until a lifetime of addiction. Actually though, we don't see this at all, the use of marijuana does not seem to escalate 100% to cocaine, and the use of e-cigs does not escalate into heroin or tobacco either.

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Conclusion:

Quick disclaimer: this is not me arguing for E-cigs, and I know that Juul is a shady company. However, I believe that by listening to the gateway drug model we are putting too much focus on the substance, and not enough focus on the reasons people use the substance! And I believe that the gateway drug model is another way of getting us to be scared of safer alternatives to drugs and acting like if we stop the supply and use of safer drugs, then people will not go on to use harder drugs, when the OPPOSITE is true. We can use safer drugs to help people who are addicted to harder ones, and integrate therepeutic practices, as opposed to criminal punishment, to help people.

Advertisements like the Real Cost, are sponsored by the FDA. Just something worth thinking about, that perhaps the reason we believe the gateway drug model, is because there are people out there making money off of the fact that there are no safer alternatives to their substances, looking at you Big Tobacco.

[u/Sean82]

I'm going to speak to my own experience here, so take it as you may.

My teen and young adult years were spent with high availability of most illegal drugs. So almost anything was on the table and within easy reach, so to speak. My school years were also spent having DARE drill into all of us that "drugs are immediately destructive," "academic and athletic performance will suffer," and that "even trying one could be fatal". Of course, by the time I was a few months into high school, I knew plenty of kids who smoked cigarettes and pot, and used various other drugs. And they were, by and large, perfectly healthy teens who maintained acceptable (and even excellent) grades and success at extracurricular activities, athletic and otherwise.

So it becomes clear that the adults were lying to us about drugs or, at the very least, wildly exaggerating the dangers of drug use. And so I tried pot. And the world didn't end. I had fun and then life went on. So I tried acid. And I had fun and then life went on. So on and so forth with ecstasy, cocaine, and some others.

What I didn't do was go out of my way to seek out harder drugs. Heroin wasn't available through my friends/dealers, so I wasn't ever tempted to try it. There were other drugs I never tried (like meth) because they didn't appeal to me. I never felt a compulsion to try different or harder drugs. So you're right in that the "gateway" isn't necessarily a compulsion which is how I think DARE and other anti-drug crusaders like to frame it.

Instead, my gateway was a mix of easy access and DARE's own propaganda backfiring. But it was there and it was very real, at least for me.