No: Marijuana Doesn’t Make You Use Cocaine or Heroin
“Marijuana is a gateway drug”, how many times have you heard this? I can’t remember, but I am pretty sure it’s somewhere close to a thousand times. And the worst part of it is not the fact that everyone on television says it, but that even progressive people have already started to believe it—conservative people always believed it, and probably always will. I recently talked to a friend of mine, he is 21, and he was worried about it as well: “do you think I will end up using heroine or cocaine? I have been smoking quite a lot of pot recently,” he asked me.
To all those who have been asking themselves or their friends similar questions, here is the answer: no, you will not end up using cocaine or heroine if you are using marijuana today, unless you decide to.
A recent study published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in fact, has clearly demonstrated a few great points that clearly support the answer I just gave you. On one side, “almost one-third (32 percent) of the roughly 42,000 survey respondents reported having used the drug during their lifetime. The prevalence of past-year use of marijuana among the students has risen by 16.7 percent, from 21.5 percent to 25.8 percent, over the past 5 years. Some 3.7 percent of the students reported daily use of marijuana in 2013, on par with the highest recorded daily use during 22 years of monitoring.” On the other, however, “The portions of survey respondents who reported using cocaine, methamphetamine, or heroin during the past year all fell non-significantly; at 0.6 percent (heroin) to 1.8 percent (cocaine), each was at the nadir of a decade-long downward trend. Although Monitoring the Future has tracked non-medical use of prescription stimulants and opioids for fewer years, students’ overall past-year and lifetime prevalence of such use were also at all-time lows for the survey.”
In other words, students and young people are smoking more pot, and they also think is not that dangerous, while, at the same time, they are using less cocaine, methamphetamine, andheroin. Now, if we all use our brain—remembering also that correlation doesn’t necessarily translate into causation—we could claim that people are choosing marijuana over heavier drugs, which are becoming less interesting thanks to our favorite plant. Go online, and buy some pot, and stop thinking about yourself as a probable-future-junkie: you are not!
