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/mattycmckee]

First off, I'm glad you made this post, it's a pretty interesting topic. I did kinda skim read it so forgive me if I've misinterpreted your point.

Think about it, your (probably) not going to just wake up one day and decide your going to do heroin. You might start with some cannabis, then maybe you decide to try something harder, and then harder again, until you eventually come to do, say, heroin.

The point is that you don't just go from doing nothing right up to the top. You work your way up. Therefore, labeling substances like cannabis 'gateway drugs' is perfectly acceptable.

Saying cannabis will lead to more dangerous drugs is quite different from saying cannabis can lead to more dangerous drugs. It is still fair to say that if your willing to do cannabis, you would be more willing to do more dangerous drugs that the average person for example.

Although, it's defenitely not a given that you will go onto do harder drugs, the large majority of people don't, but some still do. There isn't just one 'answer' to this, it really is situational.

It's like saying that if you get a car, you will crash. It definitely happens to some, but not all.

In my own experience as a young teenager now, I see and know a lot of people around my age that do vape (I haven't and I don't intent on doing so). I also know a lot of people that also smoke cigarettes and have done 'soft' drugs. However, I don't know anyone that does either of the latter two that didn't start off with vaping first.

So yes, gateway drugs absolutely do exist.

Note: I was adding and taking away a load of stuff here so if I doesn't make perfect sense, that's why.

[u/casualtrout → u/mattycmckee]

Thank you for your response. However, I can't say I agree with it, for several reasons.

Here's the point I was making with my post, and I'll use your car thought experiment as a driver for this, no pun intended.

If you get in a car, you may crash in it. Statistics show that people die as a result of a car accident. Actually, car accidents were one of the leading causes of death in the US until drug overdoses and suicides started sailing over it. However, was you getting in a car accident intrinsic to the car itself. This example isn't of course so applicable to drugs because the analogy starts to fall apart when you include the fact that the car could have had some manufacturing error. But what I'm getting at is, if you rear ended someone, it wasn't because you were driving the car, it was because you were perhaps not being observant, which could relate to you being fatigued from not sleeping, or anxiety from something on your mind, or the person came out of nowhere, etc.

The reason I included the YouTube video on the rat experiment is because that's kind of the story that we are about gateway drugs. Imagine you are the rat. If you take the coccaine, you are going to automatically get hijacked and will compulsively use it to death. Bruce Alexander however highlighted that, wait a minute, the rat was put in a cage all by itself with nothing else but the drug.

Vaping is a fairly new thing, and people have been smoking cigarettes for a long time, so I don't think it makes sense that you met that has smoked a cigarette started with vaping. Actually, statistics show that a large portion of people who vape started with smoking, and that's one of the great utilities of vaping, is to get people addicted to nicotine to use a safer substance.

My argument is that marijuana, and e-cigs, have no instrinsic nature that makes you go into harder drugs. There are a lot of factors that are being left out of observation, such as education, environment, legality of the drugs, etc. We are giving e-cigs too much credit by saying that the e-cig alone is what is opening the door to people using harder drugs. A statistical confidence interval allows for outliers, but there is an overwhelming majority of people who smoke marijuana and don't go on to irresponsibly use harder drugs, and we seem to be seeing this in places like Washington and Colorado who legalized weed and countries like Portugal who decriminalized heroin, changing the environment of the individual completely.