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-- 12-year study: Pot is not a gateway drug

12-year study: Pot is not a gateway drug

Never been much of a fan of it myself (despite me being a tree-hugging hippie unemployed smelly librul), but an interesting study nonetheless.

quote:

Study say marijuana no gateway drug Marijuana is not a �gateway� drug that predicts or eventually leads to substance abuse, suggests a 12-year University of Pittsburgh study. Moreover, the study�s findings call into question the long-held belief that has shaped prevention efforts and governmental policy for six decades and caused many a parent to panic upon discovering a bag of pot in their child�s bedroom. The Pitt researchers tracked 214 boys beginning at ages 10-12, all of whom eventually used either legal or illegal drugs. When the boys reached age 22, they were categorized into three groups: those who used only alcohol or tobacco, those who started with alcohol and tobacco and then used marijuana (gateway sequence) and those who used marijuana prior to alcohol or tobacco (reverse sequence). Nearly a quarter of the study population who used both legal and illegal drugs at some point � 28 boys � exhibited the reverse pattern of using marijuana prior to alcohol or tobacco, and those individuals were no more likely to develop a substance use disorder than those who followed the traditional succession of alcohol and tobacco before illegal drugs, according to the study, which appears in this month�s issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. �The gateway progression may be the most common pattern, but it�s certainly not the only order of drug use,� said Ralph E. Tarter, Ph.D., professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and lead author of the study. �In fact, the reverse pattern is just as accurate for predicting who might be at risk for developing a drug dependence disorder.� In addition to determining whether the gateway hypothesis was a better predictor of substance abuse than competing theories, the investigators sought to identify characteristics that distinguished users in the gateway sequence from those who took the reverse path. Out of the 35 variables they examined, only three emerged to be differentiating factors: Reverse pattern users were more likely to have lived in poor physical neighborhood environments, had more exposure to drugs in their neighborhoods and had less parental involvement as young children. Most importantly, a general inclination for deviance from sanctioned behaviors, which can become evident early in childhood, was strongly associated with all illicit drug use, whether it came in the gateway sequence, or the reverse. While the gateway theory posits that each type of drug is associated with certain specific risk factors that cause the use of subsequent drugs, such as cigarettes or alcohol leading to marijuana, this study�s findings indicate that environmental aspects have stronger influence on which type of substance is used. That is, if it�s easier for a teen to get his hands on marijuana than beer, then he�ll be more likely to smoke pot. This evidence supports what�s known as the common liability model, an emerging theory that states the likelihood that someone will transition to the use of illegal drugs is determined not by the preceding use of a particular drug but instead by the user�s individual tendencies and environmental circumstances. �The emphasis on the drugs themselves, rather than other, more important factors that shape a person�s behavior, has been detrimental to drug policy and prevention programs,� Dr. Tarter said. �To become more effective in our efforts to fight drug abuse, we should devote more attention to interventions that address these issues, particularly to parenting skills that shape the child�s behavior as well as peer and neighborhood environments.� Indeed, according to the study, interventions focusing on behavior modification may be more effective prevention tactics than current anti-drug initiatives. For example, providing guidance to parents � particularly those in high-risk neighborhoods � on how to boost their caregiving skills and foster bonding with their children, could have a measurable effect on a child�s likelihood to smoke marijuana. Also, early identification of children who exhibit antisocial tendencies could allow for interventions before drug use even begins. Although this research has significant implications for drug abuse prevention approaches, Dr. Tarter notes that the study has some limitations. First, as only male behaviors were studied, further investigation should explore if the results apply to women as well. Also, the examination of behaviors in phases beyond alcohol and marijuana consumption in the gateway series will be necessary. http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/stud...drug-12116.html

More can be found here:

http://upmc.com/Communications/News...oSmokingGun.htm

Not that things like changes our War on Drugs much. Like I said, I tend to be more of a fence-sitter on this one primarily from my lack of knowledge, but I do tend to wonder if marijuana as an illegal drug is worth the hassle, especially in comparison to other illegal drugs (and legal drugs for that matter).

Thoughts from those more knowledgable on the subject?

ive never understood its criminality, especially given the great economic & social evils of tobacco & alcohol. nobody commits crime to sustain their pot habit, instances of pot-fuelled violence are so much lower than alcohol (i mean really, who can be bothered getting off the couch!) and the levels of addiction are also much much lower.

as far as the "gateway" argument goes, people try pot before other illicit substances because it is always easier to get a hold of. if someone has a preference for illegal drugs, i dont think its logical to argue just because they tried pot and then tried E that theres a causal relationship there. for me it went tobacco, pot, alcohol, E -so should we blame tobacco as being the gateway substance?

victimless crime as far as im concerned.

I read a news article today about a study that pegged cigarettes as more of a gateway drug for teens.

They said teens that smoke cigarettes were more likely to try harder drugs in their next few years.

Cigarettes also being illegal in most places for highschoolers....

I'll try to find the link tomorrow

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being a tree-hugging hippie unemployed smelly librul

Get your ass a job hip-peh!

That out of the way, I'm not into pot and I wouldnt advocate it's abuse much the same as I don't think people should take it up like drinking too much alcohol or the coffin nails. It doesnt make you smarter or cool, actually it makes people kind of boring really IMO

At least, like it's been said. It's really not that destructive a drug in small doses unlike say, booze, meth or an opiate where people end up on a 'tear' and can be violent or do themselves some physical or mental damage.
It's more the matter of being dealt by people who are on the other side of the law and they tend to bring with them problems of association of being a known criminal. Then you end up with a criminal record and reduced job oppertunities and thus, end up in the lower income spectrum of society which has it's own problems later. Take out the criminal element and you just end up with a drug 'problem' that can be dealt with the same way as alcohol or tobacco abuse.

It's ridiculous that we even need to justify any of this to anyone.

It's our right to smoke pot if we damn well please.

source

^^ here's that news article that I referenced in my earlier post.

Why is it, that Americans are so obsessed(sp?) with ILLEGAL drugs?

It's a gateway to 7-11 man.....

remember: puff, puff, pass

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r It's a gateway to 7-11 man..... remember: puff, puff, pass

so true.

Weed was my first drug. I think if I didn't do weed, I'd be afraid to try anything else.

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Originally posted by DJ Shibby It's ridiculous that we even need to justify any of this to anyone.

Well ok, you can run off and do drugs and then I don't have to justify any of my taxes going towards any kind of rehabilitation facilities due to self inflicted, pro-choice shennanigans of chemical abuse.

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Originally posted by Lilith Well ok, you can run off and do drugs and then I don't have to justify any of my taxes going towards any kind of rehabilitation facilities due to self inflicted, pro-choice shennanigans of chemical abuse.

Yeah?

So how do you justify your tax dollars going towards locking up non-violent offenders and paying for the massive police presence needed to keep the drug war going?

Go drink your alcohol and pop a prozac.

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Originally posted by Lilith Take out the criminal element and you just end up with a drug 'problem' that can be dealt with the same way as alcohol or tobacco abuse.

Selective vision or selective opinion on your behalf?

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So how do you justify your tax dollars going towards locking up non-violent offenders and paying for the massive police presence needed to keep the drug war going?

Theres always going to be this going on at some level, decriminalising pot probably wouldnt change very much in that regard, people will still sell and grow it without any taxation on the product.
I'm talking about the long term care in institutions where people develop schitzophrenia, sometimes paranoia and other mental problems from heavy pot abuse. That runs on average about $45-50,000 a year per person.
People are fine to mess themselves up however they want, just don't want to deal with the cleanup after. I'm a strong advocate of human rights and helping out people life's dealt a rough hand too, I really have no pity for people that cause themselves injury through their own self inflicted stupidity.

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Go drink your alcohol and pop a prozac.

You really want to be taken seriously here with sad little personal attacks and assumptions?

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Originally posted by Lilith I'm talking about the long term care in institutions where people develop schitzophrenia, sometimes paranoia and other mental problems from heavy pot abuse. That runs on average about $45-50,000 a year per person.

I would like citations of where you're getting this data, please.

Also, have any studies been done to show that these people aren't paranoid (and the resulting psychological disorders thereafter) due to the stress of social and governmental jurisdictions on the drug trade of marijuana?

Are there even unbiased, independent studies linking marijuana to any given disease, such as schizophrenia? Or any studies saying that it is useful? It's been used both recreationally and as a medicine for at least 12,000 years now... so what's going on in the last 60 years in America?

The problem is that our drug war has caused an information vacuum to open up, due to the extreme regulation of the product in legal scientific testing.

Also, you mention that people will grow and sell marijuana even if it was legalized to avoid taxation.

I would say that this is most likely not the case, and I'd probably cite alcohol distribution as a key example. How many people build pot stills, or reflux condensors, and distill their own alcohol? Almost no one.

quote:

People are fine to mess themselves up however they want, just don't want to deal with the cleanup after. I'm a strong advocate of human rights and helping out people life's dealt a rough hand too,

Yes, people will mess themselves up however they choose. Legally or illegally. Drugs or other means. You're willing to pay taxes for the war in iraq, or for some kid's physical therapy he needs from the state because he blew his legs off playing with fireworks, but you're drawing the line at ... the rare institutionalization of schizophrenics allegedly (and potentially propagandistically) linked to marijuana smoking?

quote:

I really have no pity for people that cause themselves injury through their own self inflicted stupidity.

Ah, "self inflicted stupidity"? Kind of like creating a drug war money machine and unleashing it on the citizens of a country, leading to countless unnecessary arrests and death? Yes! Very unnecessary and reckless indeed.

Why exactly do you assume that people are naturally going to injure themselves?

How about we educate them then? Spread information and safety guidelines? Instead of jumping ahead and complaining about money (the most dangerous drug of all) which we haven't even lost yet on assumptions that we have no data on?

quote:

personal attacks and assumptions?

Ah, sorry, wasn't intended as personal; it was meant more as a quip at the general legal methods that middle culture utilizes to achieve recreation (aka: get "high").

peace

It's a mild halucenogenic, quite powerful depressant and it's addictive, theres a veritable ton of views on it from dozens of medical institutions on the net which present the pro-con and maybes of the use of this drug. It's all out there for people to read and make their own decisions.
That and I've known two people personally who've developed serious mental problems which where not evident to them smoking pot in the ten years from 16-26years old, I knew them quite well.

Aside from that-

quote:

Go drink your alcohol and pop a prozac.

Rubbish, you 'don't mean it to be personal' or why would you use a reference to me drinking alcohol or having to take antidepressants? You where deliberately aiming to get a rise out of me to skew the argument so I'd end up in a bit of a tangent rather than the subject at hand, possibly get me annoyed and therefore bettering your own point of view on the subject.
And thats basically where this argument for me ends because I won't be baited into a slanging match.

I've never heard of someone going "insane" from chronic marijuana use. Maybe marijuana combined with other drugs, but not just from pot. I'd love to see some literature that does state chronic marijuana use can lead to long-term, non-reversible psychiatric conditions.

Besides me being a libertarian nut job, my biggest problem with marijuana is the double-standard. Millions of people take prescription (and even over-the-counter) drugs with far worse side effects than marijuana. We allow alcohol and tobacco to be legal even though both have proven to be far more dangerous than marijuana. We have no problem with people going to the doctor, or down to the convenience store to stock up on mind-altering and pain-numbing substances, but when someone wants to smoke a plant, we get all concerned. If we sat down, looked at the facts, and then revised our drug policy we'd realize drugs that are already legal and readily available are a far bigger burden on our society than marijuana could ever be. I'm not saying we should pull existent drugs from the shelf, but we should put marijuana and it's use into proper perspective.

On another note, declaring something as a "gateway" anything is ridiculous. It's like all the bad science that goes into some disease and pollutant studies:

1. Find a group
2. Find something in common with all of them
3. Declare that common factor to either be the "cause" or a "gateway" substance.

I guess in illicit drug use, Tylenol is the biggest gateway drug of all. I don't know a single chronic drug user that hasn't tried acetaminophen at least once.

quote:

Originally posted by Lilith I'm talking about the long term care in institutions where people develop schitzophrenia, sometimes paranoia and other mental problems from heavy pot abuse. That runs on average about $45-50,000 a year per person.

Lilith, do you have a source for such a claim? This is the first I heard of anything like this - I would be very interested to see any primary literature that supports this assertion.

quote:

You really want to be taken seriously here with sad little personal attacks and assumptions?

I'll let you two fight this out, but I would be careful on calling on anyone making assumptions if you yourself cannot support certain assertions as the one above. If you can, however, than I happily stand corrected.

Yeah-
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/184/2/110
Cites a few different sources of investigation into it from a couple of countries doing independant studies. All's said and done, like I've said a couple of times here it's not that bad in casual use or even in clinical use, its the chronic abuse where people end up just as bad as an alcoholic in terms of dependancy. My mother when she was in the final throes of multiple sclerosis (and a few other complications) used to take it to help alleviate some of the spasticity, muscle spasms and pain. Being an MD, she knew more about these things than I do, I'm not a doctor Pity she's not around anymore otherwise I could drag up some more info from her for you.

But thats it for me in this thread.

quote:

Originally posted by Lilith Yeah- http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/184/2/110 Cites a few different sources of investigation into it from a couple of countries doing independant studies. All's said and done, like I've said a couple of times here it's not that bad in casual use or even in clinical use, its the chronic abuse where people end up just as bad as an alcoholic in terms of dependancy. My mother when she was in the final throes of multiple sclerosis (and a few other complications) used to take it to help alleviate some of the spasticity, muscle spasms and pain. Being an MD, she knew more about these things than I do, I'm not a doctor Pity she's not around anymore otherwise I could drag up some more info from her for you. But thats it for me in this thread.

Excellent source catch - thanks for posting! I'll take a look at this later today.

Two important lines in that article:

quote:

The studies reviewed earlier show that cannabis use is clearly not a necessary cause for the development of psychosis, by failing to show that all adults with schizophrenia used cannabis in adolescence. It is also clear that cannabis use is not a sufficient cause for later psychosis because the majority of adolescent cannabis users did not develop schizophrenia in adulthood. Therefore, we can conclude that cannabis use is a component cause, among possibly many others, forming part of a causal constellation that leads to adult schizophrenia.

quote:

A minority of individuals experience harmful outcome consequent to their use of cannabis. However, this minority is significant both from a clinical point of view and at a population level. It is estimated that about 8% of schizophrenia could be prevented by elimination of cannabis use in the population.

We can therefore say that marijuana is not a direct cause of schizophrenia, but can compound existing factors to lead to schizophrenic symtpoms. It's like saying alcohol alone causes alcoholism. There are genetic factors that go into causing a person to become an alcoholic which can be identified prior to a person drinking.

I think the 8% figure needs a lot more looking at as well. The 8% figure comes from a New Zealand study (which the authors even admit as being small) of a little over 1000 children who were followed through development. That study stated:

quote:

This effect indicates that cannabis users at age 18 years had elevated scores on the schizophrenic symptom scale only if they had reported psychotic symptoms at age 11 years.

Again showing that marijuana does not cause psychosis, but may cause more symptoms in those already afflicted with the disorder. I'd also like to see more numbers in this study that lead to the 8% figure. How many of the children smoked marijuana, and of those 1000, how many showed schizophrenic symptoms? Out of a study of only 1000, it is hard for me to agree that the 8% figure could be projected on the world schizophrenic population.

It was an interesting article, it definitely brought up some studies I was not familiar with, although the only thing I leave the paper with is the assumption that marijuana (and in most of the studies any illicit substance) can lead to increased incidence of schizophrenic and psychotic episodes in those already afflicted or prone to the disorder.

I hope to see more studies using more thorough figures (if meta-analysis continues to be used), and hopefully a study that is able to use it's own large-scale population sampling instead of meta-analysis.

quote:

Originally posted by NeoPhono Two important lines in that article: We can therefore say that marijuana is not a direct cause of schizophrenia, but can compound existing factors to lead to schizophrenic symtpoms. It's like saying alcohol alone causes alcoholism. There are genetic factors that go into causing a person to become an alcoholic which can be identified prior to a person drinking.

Aye; a psychedelic drug, any really, can in theory exacerbate certain hallucinatory psychoses, such as schizophrenia. Similar to how alcohol can exacerbate someone's rage who has natural anger problems.

The weird thing being that we give psychoactive treatment palliative remedies to almost all schizophrenia patients.

I look forward to more studies too, and we're slowly starting to see them (finally!).

What I'd really like even more data on is the results of marijuana in countries where it is tolerated or even legal. I know that certain countries even sell marijuana in special cafes...

So do these countries with marijuana cafes tend to show 8% more of the population developing schizophrenia? I highly doubt it.

Thanks for the source though, even though I already have read this particular one, it is a good resource for everyone.

cheers

Weed will never become legal in my state as the black market it generates is good for our economic cycle, due to the fact you have to spend the money on non tracable ways like buying a new tv or clothes etc. You can't just put it in the bank and use it to pay for your mortgage. That and the fact it is the #1 export interstate to the Eastern states closely matched by wine.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN ive never understood its criminality, especially given the great economic & social evils of tobacco & alcohol. nobody commits crime to sustain their pot habit, instances of pot-fuelled violence are so much lower than alcohol (i mean really, who can be bothered getting off the couch!) and the levels of addiction are also much much lower. as far as the "gateway" argument goes, people try pot before other illicit substances because it is always easier to get a hold of. if someone has a preference for illegal drugs, i dont think its logical to argue just because they tried pot and then tried E that theres a causal relationship there. for me it went tobacco, pot, alcohol, E -so should we blame tobacco as being the gateway substance? victimless crime as far as im concerned.

weed is illegal because it was considered the "black man's tobacco" during a very racist period in history, and it threatened to destroy the very powerful tobacco industry and ruin entire state economies that depended on tobacco farming.

weed remains illegal today because it is more profitable for the gorvernment and drug dealers than if it were legally regulated. you can't legally regulate weed with much success because it is so incredibly easy to cultivate on your own... unlike cigarettes and alcohol.

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