Alcohol is a drug. That's like saying what's the difference between a Cadillaic and cars.
As for your points:
1. It is definitely possible to have a little amount of pot and not get altered. Much like it's possible to have a little amount of alcohol and get altered. All that is dependent on the strength and quantity of both drugs. You can drink a twelve pack of near bear that has a 0.5% alcohol volume and not feel much, much like you can smoke a pound of 0.5% THC ditchweed and not feel anything. Conversely, you could take a shot of everclear and get blasted like you can take a hit of 18% THC weed and get blasted.
2. If you have any proof that pot is a gateway drug, I'd like to see it. The stats would indicate otherwise. There are 13 million or so past month pot smokers and around 2 million and around 700k past month heroin users. Not a huge gateway. The reason more pot users go on to use other illicit drugs as opposed to alcohol users is partially from sheer volume, and because pot users are exposed to a black market that sells other drugs where alcohol users are not, in general
3. I have no idea what your definition of "frequent" is but it certainly isn't what most people use. Psychosis in general is rare, and even a 40% increase of something (if you buy that pot use is 40% more likely to increase the risk of psychosis) rare isn't frequent in my book.
1. I smoked pot occasionally in my teens and no, the first hit gets you feeling differently. The stuff they grow and sell these days, I have heard, has far higher THC content than I ever knew. So you are wrong. One good hit will alter your consciousness. Not so with a small glass of wine or what have you.
2. I quickly googled marijuana gateway drug statistics and found what looked like an even number of reasonably decent looking studies that both proved it and disproved it. So I asked myself, did I start with pot and then go on to harder stuff? And what about my friends? And so I come down on the side of the studies that show that marijuana is often the first of increasingly strong drugs.
I ask you in all honesty, was marijuana your first illegal drug? Did you do harder drugs after? Think of ten of your marijuana using friends. Did any of them start with marijuana, then move on to harder stuff? My guess is, most did.
3. The psychosis studies are recent and made big news; I am surprised you didn’t hear of them:
“Smoking marijuana can increase your risk of developing a psychotic illness by more than 40 per cent, authors conclude in a controversial study in this week’s edition of The Lancet.
The study suggests that even occasional pot use could raise the risk of psychosis, a category of mental disorders that includes schizophrenia. The authors say the findings underline the need to remind marijuana users of the long-term risks.
Dr. Theresa Moore, University of Bristol, and Dr. Stanley Zammit, Cardiff University, and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 35 studies, dated up to 2006, to see whether there was evidence to connect cannabis use to mental health disorders.
They found that those who smoked pot were 41 per cent more likely to develop a psychotic illness than those who had never used the drug. “
Even without that study I knew this. An ex boyfriend of mine quit pot because it was “making him paranoid.” The stereotype of the paranoid pot user has, like most stereotypes, a basis in fact. It is commonly known, and doesn’t much need a study to prove it.
Consider my tagline: What doe the Left want me to do? It wants you to go get high. Because you are far less useful that way.