There’s no question that Cannabis is a gateway, but to where is the question. If you read all the classic anti-pot literature, the answer is straight into the arms of a heroin needle and a Grand Theft Auto-style shootout with police.
Coined in the ’70s and popularized in the ’80s, the concept of Cannabis as a stepping stone to a life of hard drugs has been used as an argument against the plant for almost 100 years. Even though many of us live in states that accept Cannabis as an “adult-use” substance like beer or wine, this administration’s pick for head of the FDA has already referred to Cannabis as a gateway drug. So, it might be worth having a look at how Cannabis came to be labeled a gateway, whether that science holds up, and what we’ve learned since.
Many attribute the term to works published in the 1970s by Dr. Robert DuPont and Dr. Denise Kandel. Tasked by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the causes of drug use, Kandel discovered a link between tobacco use and a proclivity for cocaine in animals and found that the statistical link between those substances in humans included the use of Cannabis. DuPont’s book, “Getting Tough on Gateway Drugs,” described weed as one of the most dangerous drugs there is and suggested that without it, the chain from legal substances to illicit ones breaks down. Each of these arguments was founded by the fact that hard drug users had also used Cannabis, but neither proved a link between using Cannabis and using harder drugs.
Kandel has since emphasized that framing Cannabis as the first stone in the chain ignores the giant boulder of easier-to-find substances like wine or nicotine. In fact, she and her husband, Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Dr. Eric Kandel, co-authored a paper on the molecular basis for nicotine as the real gateway drug. DuPont admitted in a 2000 interview that his stance on Cannabis has shifted profoundly over the years and that back then, in a meeting with President Richard Nixon, he was told: “If you make any hint of supporting decriminalization, you are history. Everything else, you figure it out. But that one, I’m telling you, that’s the deal.”
Looking at studies today, there does seem to be evidence to support both cases for Cannabis leading to other types of drug use. A Colorado study examining whether or not legalization in the state had led to a rise in dangerous crime or drug abuse found no statistical evidence that smoking weed was leading to a rise in things like heroin or crack, nor were people being robbed on the street as a way to score the next joint. Over in Europe, a Spanish study looked at adolescents to see if Cannabis use increased a chance of opioid use and concluded that there was an increased correlation between those who used opioids and people who also reported using Cannabis.
The American Addiction Centers published a survey showing Cannabis is far behind alcohol and tobacco in terms of the first substance people try. However, that number doubled for Cannabis as the second substance and stayed significantly high in the “third-tried” category. Still, to Kandel’s original point, tobacco and alcohol made up 89.6% of the first-tried category, which supports the thought that Cannabis is present but not the cause of any sort of drug trajectory.
So will smoking weed put you on track to dangerous drug use? There are a ton of sociological, economic and behavioral factors that come into play around drug use. And while exposure to drugs during adolescence may increase the likelihood of future use, the data seems to suggest that weed might be along for the ride, but I don’t think it’s the one driving the car.
