You may have heard that marijuana is a gateway drug. Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie makes this argument seemingly . Anti-drug groups .
The evidence seems convincing enough at first blush;studies show that 99 percent of illicit drug users . Buton its own,this line of thinking actually is pretty tenuous. We could also safely assume that 99 percent of illicit drug users also tried coffee, or soda, or chocolate milk before moving on to stronger substances.
in the Journal of School Health could shed some light on this question.A team of researchers from Texas A&M and the University of Florida examined data from 2,800 U.S. 12th-graders interviewed for the , an annual federal survey of teen drug use. They wanted to establish which substances teens typically used first.
They give away their findings in the title of their paper: “Prioritizing Alcohol Prevention: EstablishingAlcohol as the Gateway Drug and LinkingAge of First Drink With Illicit Drug Use.” They found that “the vast majority of respondents reported usingalcohol prior to either tobacco or marijuana initiation.”
Not only that, but of those three main substances — alcohol, tobacco and marijuana — kids were theleast likely to start using pot before the others.
“Alcohol was the most widely used substanceamong respondents, initiated earliest, and alsothe first substance most commonly used in the progressionof substance use,” the researchers concluded.
Itap not clear to what degree, if any, this reflects greateravailabilityof alcohol. Researchers typically see marijuanaas in the same general universe of availability as alcohol and tobacco, simply because use of those three areso widespread compared to other substances. In fact 12th-graders now are more likely to use marijuana than tobacco, despite one being legal and the other not.Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University that perceived availability of marijuana, as measured in the Monitoring the Future studies, has been at a high level for 20 years.
But we’re still playing a game of “which drug came first” here. The researchers go on to argue that the question of which drugs kids start with is a lot less important than the question ofhow early they start using. “Overall, early onset substance initiation, whetherthat is alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, exerts apowerful influence over future health risk behaviors,” they write.
For starters, theyfound that the earlier kidsstarted using alcohol, the more likely they were to go on to try other drugs. Kids who had their first drink in 6th or 7th grade went on to try an average nearly two illicit substances later. By contrast, kids who waited until 12th grade to drink had only tried an average of 0.4 substances.
They also found that adolescents who drank at a young age went on to useillicit drugs more frequently than those who waited. They didn’t examine marijuana or tobacco similarly, because the numbers of kids starting with those drugs were so relatively low.
To the extent that thereis a gateway drug, then, itap alcohol. But the notion of a “gateway” is less important, in this study, than the question of when kids take that first step on the path of substance use.
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Keep in mind,though, that these questions were asked of 12th-graders.People who started drinking in 12th grade didn’t have as much time before the survey was administered to try other substances. If you asked similar questions of people in their late 20s, for instance, you’d probably find that some of those late starters still went on to try other drugs in college.
The other big caveat here is that, as the researchers stress, this is just an observational study thatap unable to tease out coincidence from causality. Itap entirely possible that kids who drink early are naturally predisposed to try other drugs, due to factors invisible to this particular study — genetics, home environment, etc. The most likely scenario is that the causality works both ways: Drinking early makes kids more likely to try other drugs, and kids inclined to try other drugs are also predisposed to experiment with alcohol early.
In the past, that legalizing marijuana would lead to more teen drug use, and that taxes generated from marijuana sales amounted to “blood money.”
“I’m not going to put the lives of children and citizens at risk to put a little more money into the state coffers, at least not on my watch,” he said in March.
But if taxes on marijuana amount to “blood money,” Christie so far has had no qualms with accepting taxes on the sales of alcohol. In 2013, he signed. The bill allows distillers to produce 640 gallons of hard spirits per year, provided they pay a $938 licensing fee.
