The Definitive Reasons Mom Was Wrong: Weed Is Not A Gateway Drug

Weed isn’t making us tired, this f*cking argument is.

The argument that weed leads to heroin and crack and meth. The argument that weed should be illegal because it leads to greater dangers. The argument that weed is bad and alcohol is good. This argument that weed is a goddamn gateway drug.

We’re tired of the constant battle, the damaging argument and the f*cking bullsh*t every uptight mom, ignorant assh*le and uninformed politician spreads with as much ignorance and disregard as herpes.

And that’s what it feels like -- this argument we just can’t shake. This thing that keeps coming back, year after year, no matter how much research and scientific evidence comes out to nip it in the bud.

Yeah sure, some people move on to harder drugs, to detrimental, dangerous, addictive poisons after trying the herb, but what about all the other things they’ve tried? What about nicotine and alcohol? What about chocolate?

What’s happening here is everyone’s confusing correlation for causation. If a child grows up to be overweight does that mean the chocolate he ate as a child is the cause? Does that mean anyone who has ever eaten chocolate is going to grow up to be fat? Does that mean sugar should be illegal because some people can’t stop eating it?

It’s this ignorance that’s consuming our culture and victimizing the wrong people.

We assume weed is the cause because weed comes before heroin, because people try weed before they try meth. But according to a report published in Psychology Today, alcohol and cigarettes come before weed. Sugar comes before weed. Social isolation and abuse come before weed.

Dr. Karen Van Gundy, an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, reaffirms that,

Whether marijuana smokers go on to use other illicit drugs depends more on social factors like being exposed to stress and being unemployed, not so much whether they smoked a joint in the eighth grade. Because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first illicit drug used.

But that’s not the only argument that should dispel this tiring battle.

The facts are the facts, and anyone who smokes weed or advocates for its legalization understands that the only thing weed is a gateway to is the fridge.

As the number of pot smokers goes up, the number of hard drug users goes down

According to Time's, "Marijuana as a Gateway Drug: The Myth That Will Not Die," as the number of marijuana users increases, the number of cocaine and crystal meth users decreases. Case in point, in 2007 there were 14.4 million marijuana users in the US and 2.1 million cocaine users. By 2012, there were 18.9 million marijuana users and 1.7 million cocaine users.

The number of people using methamphetamine also fell from 530,000 to 440,000.

Numbers do not lie. Numbers are as good as science. And these numbers say that the more people smoke weed and get it from secure and legalized locations, the less likely these people are to go on to harder stuff. This is an inverse relationship we should all get behind.

Controlled substances are more of a gateway to illicit drugs

Let’s talk about pain killers, alcohol and nicotine. The three things our government not only condones, but sells at every corner — some legally attainable at just 18.

According to The Examiner, marijuana is only the third most popular recreational drug. The first two are alcohol and tobacco. And while 25 million Americans have smoked marijuana in the past year (14 million considered to be regular users), according to a Gallup poll conducted on American consumption of alcohol, in 2012, 66 percent of Americans reported drinking more than four drinks a week. That’s over 207 million people.

So not only do we have more people drinking alcohol than smoking marijuana, a study published in the Journal of School Health affirmed that alcohol does more brain damage on children than marijuana.

A team of researchers used a sample of 14,577 high school seniors to evaluate the use of cocaine, methamphetamines and LSD and where the origin of those drugs began. Their findings concluded that alcohol was predominately the first drug most high schoolers abused, with 72.2 percent of the students identifying alcohol as their first deviant behavior — only 43.3 percent mentioned marijuana use.

Let’s look at Europe

The last main argument used to keep marijuana under the stigma of gateway drug is that when someone goes to score weed from a dealer, he or she is introduced to new drugs. While that may be true, it just adds more of a case to legalize weed, or at least control it.

Holland is a perfect example of how legalized marijuana led to decreased use of harder drugs.

In a University of California, Berkeley study on Holland's legalized programs published in the Journal “Addiction,” through the use of 700 retail marijuana outlets, the Dutch managed to reduce the contact between marijuana use and hard drugs,with the probability of trying cocaine among marijuana users is 22 percent in Amsterdam, but 33 percent in the US.

Results from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health also found that lifetime heroin use in the United States in 2009 was 1.5 percent while the Netherlands maintained just 0.5 percent.

To add insult to injury, according to a UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2013, the homicide rate in the United States in 2012 was at 4.7 and the Netherlands just at 0.9.

If we're going to continue the trend of correlation and causation.