I don’t expect to change your mind. You live in some bizarre place where you seem to believe that being drunk is illegal, with your only evidence of this being public intoxication laws which not every state has or even really enforces. But ok, if you’re math skills are decent here’s the numbers for you.
According to NIDA in 2009 (and some of these figures are from 2008 since NIDA sucks at being consistent with showing past month usage in raw numbers on their website) there were 16.7 million past month marijuana users. There were 1.9 million past month cocaine users. There were 213,000 past month heroin users, and 314,000 past month crystal meth users.
So the percentage of monthly cocaine to pot users is 11%, for heroin it’s 1.2%, and for meth it’s 1.9%. If pot were any sort of “gateway” drug those numbers would be much larger as pot use has been steady since the early 90s. Many of those users would have “graduated” to the harder drugs, yet the percentages tell you that even combined it’s less than 15% who do. Apparently you are some sort of statistical anomaly since you know so many potheads who went on to harder drugs when the numbers say that it’s less than 1 out of 5 who do. We can go on past year numbers too (28.5 million for marijuana, 1.2 for meth, 5.8 for cocaine, 605K for heroin, which leads to 27%...or slightly more than 1 in 4...a massive gateway there).
Now I will grant that most likely 95% or more of all those hard drug users had tried pot before. Makes perfect sense to me that anyone willing to use a hard drug would try a drug that’s far more benign and more commonly available first. I would also wager that 95% or more of them had drank as well.
I will also grant that the percentage of people who have tried booze that had gone on to heroin (or coke or whatever) is much smaller than the percentage of pot users who have gone onto heroin, but that’s only because the number of people how drink in this country is much greater than the number of people who have tried pot in this country, and since you are a math teacher you know that percentages typically get smaller when the pool is increased. If the number of people who drank was in line with the number of people who smoked pot in this country, the percentage would most likely be the same considering virtually all hard drug users drank and smoked before they used hard drugs.
Some influences are hard to track.
For instance, the fact is marijuana is illegal for recreational use pretty much everywhere. Those who are willing to break the law to get high are probably more risk taking individuals and so more likely to try hash, or cocaine, or meth, or whatever.
But you can’t really track it. Either way.
As for alcohol, I do believe those who were (illegally) drinking or getting drunk underage probably go on to use illegal drugs more often, again because are probably the most addiction prone, the highest risk takers, the most rebellious or anti-social types. Whereas those who waited until legal drinking age, and/or never drank to get drunk, probably very rarely go on to abuse illegal drugs.
But you can’t track for that, either, at least I have never seen it broken out.
These studies you cite, and there are many that say many different things, only go so far. I don’t discount them entirely and they are useful. However, just knowing my own self and people I have been close to over the decades, I have pretty well seen what human nature is.
I have concluded that legal drug abuse is a stupid and very harmful idea. It hurts the abusers, it hurts their loved ones, it hurts their victims, it hurts their dependents, and it hurts society at large. It offers nothing positive to the individual and active harm to those who have not chosen to engage in it.