The Most Common Gateway Drug

Humans are always trying to find the most efficient product or the best bang for their buck, so that’s why drug abusers don’t settle for lesser highs, such as marijuana. The use of marijuana users under the age of eighteen has sky-rocketed since the late 1960’s and has since increase by sixty-seven percent. The use of marijuana has now been used as a daily regimen for adolescents and studies show that they use the drub more than three-hundred days out of the year.

When people think of the gateway theory, they would describe it as an individual wanting to use a more potent drug than the one that they are currently using because the use of their current drug makes them assume that the more potent drug is not as dangerous as society implies. Studies have shown that both alcohol and tobacco use have lead users to using marijuana. The studies have also shown that marijuana is a precursor to more illicit drugs.

In another study, adults who were early marijuana users were found to be five times more likely to become dependent on any drug, eight times more likely to use cocaine, and fifteen times more likely to use heroin later in life. The Colombia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, reported that teens who used marijuana at least once in the last thirteen months are thirteen times more likely to use drugs such as cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines, and also twenty-six times more likely to use marijuana as a gateway to other drugs than teens who did not use marijuana as a gateway to more illicit drugs.

Marijuana is a proven gateway drug and most illicit drug users claim to have used marijuana before the current drug they’re abusing. As eye opening as these studies may seem these results will continue to progress and become worse because the use of marijuana have become an everyday thing in the lives of adolescents. Although, these studies are devastating they have become the norm in today’s society which is very different from the society that first introduced the drug.

ABSTRACT

Mandal, B. K. (2012). IS MARIJUANA A PRECURSOR TO ABUSE OF OTHER DRUGS? JOURNAL OF PHARMACEUTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION, 13-14.