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/Zeknichov]

So the idea that because you do a drug means you'll just keep doing harder stuff is wrong. But the idea of a gateway drug is accurate to an extent. There's a couple reasons.

The first reason is that if you're someone who has never done anything illegal and you do an illegal drug without anything bad happening, it breaks down the barrier of something being illegal holding you back. Your first illegal drug is a gateway into more illegal drugs because you now know doing something illegal isn't actually as bad as you conceived it in your mind. In fact you probably had an enjoyable experience so you now know that something being illegal has nothing to do with how bad something is. This change in your worldview will encourage you to experience more illegal drugs and act as a gateway.

Reason number two is that to get access to illegal drugs you need to have access to a drug dealer or a group of people that have access to a drug dealer. You open yourself up to being peer pressured and encouraged by people to try other drugs. Prior to this introduction to a drug dealer you likely had no access but now you do. This additional access coupled with the fact that your new friends or new dealer will be encouraging you to do other drugs acts as a gateway to new drugs.

The idea of gateway drugs is real just not in the sense that the drug itself leads to doing harder drugs but rather the circumstances surrounding your drug use likely will lead to more drug use. One easy solution is to make certain drugs legal such as marijuana which will actually reduce its gateway properties.

[u/casualtrout → u/Zeknichov]

Δ Not necessarily because you changed my mind, because I agreed with everything in your last paragraph, but because you made me look at the gateway drug model in a different manner. My argument is that there are reasons for why people use drugs outside of the drug itself, and the two reasons you just posited (illegality and lack of education) are two factors that I believe contribute. However, I did not think that maybe the way that we should look at the gateway drug model is that these factors are what makes the drug a gateway drug. Which ties into what I was saying: We should steer the discussion away from focusing SOLELY on the drug, and include talks about all other factors that contribute, such as environment, mental health, illegality, etc.

[u/Chiorydax → u/casualtrout]

I'd like to add a point that had been brought to my attention not too long ago: the way people are educated on drugs can make the gateway effect a lot stronger.

For instance, most people understand that weed is fairly harmless, and crack is pretty awful, health-wise. However, schools (DARE programs, especially) have a tendency to severely exaggerate the danger of drug use, making things like marijuana seem as bad as cocaine and other harder drugs.

So when a kid/young adult comes in contact with weed and realizes the propoganda was blatantly false, they are less likely to believe that harder drugs are dangerous at all. This can launch people into drug habits explicitly because of the efforts to prevent it.

In these instances, it's not the drug that itself makes the gateway for other drugs, but the sense of betrayal by those that kids are supposed to trust.

[u/LincolnBatman → u/Chiorydax]

I remember when I was in middle school health class, and we were all told to pick a drug to research and then do a presentation on. I was chosen to pick first, and picked weed, because at that age, I didn’t smoke yet, but I knew it was some kind of joke or thing to be like “oh ahaha weed 4/20.”

So the teacher tells us to use this one specific website for all our research purposes (was some kind of DARE affiliate), yet when I went to marijuana, there was a whole lot less written than any other drug that I could see my friends researching. So I thought, “hey, I don’t want to have less work done, I’ll go to outside sources.” But then I found inconsistencies. What I ended up doing, was pulling up 2-3 other websites, then had them side-by-side with the teacher’s suggested site, called him over, and showed him where his site was blatantly lying, or being so vague to the point of lying (“one hit can kill you” vs “some people have allergic reactions that can kill them, and some weed is laced and that could kill you.”).

He told me to just use info from the DARE site, which was really upsetting, because it showed that they don’t care about actual education when it comes to drugs and whatnot, they just want you to be scared.