subject: Gateway Drug Issues [print this page] With the majority of drug misuse "experts" (NB: my opinion of an expert is someone who has both studied the substances and consumed many of them - experience is the only ideal teacher), weed is thought to be an initiator substance, usually known as a "gateway" substance.
What is meant by this is that if John Doe decides to start smoking weed as they might be inquisitive, his social circle are pressing him or maybe because he saw the "fridge pants" episode of Frasier, he then goes into the experience of illicit substances through that same gateway... And the gateway leads to a plethora of bizarre and harmful places...
Places like smack, crystal meth, cocaine and speed.
This is a pretty severe amount of trouble.
And why would that be?
Because it's not true.
It is in fact both a distorted form of logic and a side effect of the prohibition based legislation. Let me explain how this works, otherwise these words are as silly as the fear driven yelling that I am attempting to lay waste to.
OK, so, the idea is that men and women who consume Schedule I drugs have, by a large statistical degree, all taken marijuana at some point before in their lives.
Therefore, those who smoke cannabis pot bear a statistically higher possibility of becoming a consumer of far more harmful drugs. This is the core of the gateway drug argument.
And as I mentioned, there are a couple of issues concerning that view.
To start with, there is a distortion of common language and logic.
If I said to you that most opiate abusers had been marijuana smokers before that, the human brain processes the word "most" as a generalization. It basically converts it into the word "all" in the perception of our brain, should we take in the statement without thought.
There is nothing we can do about this. The only way we can take in the unyielding amount of data about our lives is to distort large parts of it.
So we are left with the words: All heroin abusers have been cannabis smokers previously.
Again, the brain will chop this up to mean the opposite is also true, thinking that they are equal: All weed smokers will become opiate users later on.
And that is not the truth.
The problem is if an "authority" yells often enough, loud enough, then they can thrust tricks such as this on our minds, purely because that is how our brains are wired.
Thankfully, it takes just a couple of seconds of clear thought to cripple these supposed authorities.
A larger issue would be the conditioning of society to allow those in authority to do their thinking for them, but that argument is for another time.
The 2nd problem I spoke of is the fact that this statistic is really only valid because of prohibition.
If marijuana smokers did not have to go to individuals who also sell smack, cocaine and ice, they would not buy them as much.
It's like going to the store for BBQ lighter fluid, being told that it is illegal because it is made out of a potentially dangerous chemical and then walking up the street to a gangster who sells explosives, rifles and guns to buy exactly the same stuff.
This gateway argument only exists because pot is placed in the same logistical channels as crack, meth and heroin. The moment it is taken away from the sales channels, the consumption dynamics revise themselves and this issue disappears.
The people of the Netherlands made moves to free up the laws surrounding pot possession and sales in the last quarter of the 20th century. As a result, coke and opiate purchasing massively shrank.
So, is pot a gateway drug?
Not in the slightest.
And if anyone thinks that it is, it is as a result of using broken logic in a situation developed by the drug authorities of our world.
It has often said that weed can liberate a persons thinking. I think a person could just purchase it and never smoke it. It would still liberate your thinking.
Why?
Because then you would get first hand experience of some of the most stupid situations ever created by human beings.
