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.
2. Of course pot is the first illicit drug used before someone who is a heroin user or a coke user goes on to try that. For one, it's a much more mild drug than those two. When I was a kid and first visited an amusement park I didn't go right on a 300 foot roller coaster that went 70+ MPH. I rode the Ferris Wheel and the Tilt O Wheel first before I would even consider riding that. Plus, it's the more common, widely available drug in the illicit marketplace. I would wager most people come across pot in their lives before they come across heroin or coke.
That being said, the numbers disprove the gateway theory. There are 15.2 million past month pot users. 2.4 million are past month cocaine users. 119k have used heroin in the past month. And about 600k past month meth users. If you combine them all (about 3.1 million) the percentage is 20% of all of the popular hard drug past month users equals the total of past month pot users. If pot were a gateway drug, I'd think that number would be over 20%.
3. I've read the study. Your claim was that it was frequent. That is what I'm disputing. Psychosis in general is infrequent in this country. This would be like saying that if you go swimming in the ocean and wear a red bathing suit you are 40% more likely to get bit by a shark. Yet if that increased the odds of getting bit by a shark from 1 in a million to 1 and 600k, that wouldn't mean that wearing red trunks makes one get bit by a shark "frequently."
How is one "less useful" if they are getting high, compared to pretty much all the crap out there where one can tune reality out? Is the person getting high "less useful" than my ex-girlfriend who would spend hours at home watching crap like the Bachelor and Bad Girls Club? Or is that person "less useful" than my cousin who plays World of Warcraft for what seems to be 12 hours a day?