[silverleaf]

Despite all efforts to deny that pot is a gateway, it will never be undone.

Too many families have lived through it, or lost kids or other loved ones through the gateway.

Can't bring myself to read it. Have they proven how many heroin users/addicts did NOT start as pot users?

[freedumb2003]

Interesting -- and it confirms my suspicions.

[tacticalogic]

Despite all efforts to deny that pot is a gateway, it will never be undone.

Can't bring myself to read it.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

[worst-case scenario]

How many heroin users started with beer? Chocolate? Cigarettes?

How many pot users become junkies? College graduates? Parents? Mere sequence of events does not prove correlation.

[Dead Corpse]

I've tried pot a couple of times. Nothing recent.

Still no "urge" to try heroin.

The exception doesn't prove the rule, but statistically, the gateway theory has about as much validity as Algore's global warming theories do.

[opinionator]

Have they proven how many heroin users/addicts did NOT start as pot users?

How many heroin users have drunk milk? Probably close to 100%. There must be some cause/effect relationship there too.

[brazzaville]

Good morning.

"Have they proven how many heroin users/addicts did NOT start as pot users?"

I would say that the percentage of pot smokers who become heroin addicts/users would be a more important number.

I've known folks who were junkies from their early teens until the crap killed them who never smoked dope. I've known long term alcoholics who consider pot smokers to be demons from Hell, talking about how evil it is while destroying their marriages and their health with Old Kessler(Smooth As Silk) whiskey or Buckhorn beer. I can't count the number of people I've known who smoke dope who neither do smack, drink or wreck their life with some other poison. You are probably acquainted with a few yourself without even knowing about it.

More important, to me at least, is the huge number of lives that have been ruined and the massive cost to society incurred by the drug laws more than by the drug itself.

This is one of those topics, like religion, that I keep swearing I'm going to avoid but I just can't resist commenting on. It's a good thing I don't have that problem with any drugs but caffeine anymore. The Camels were killing me. My hatred is for amphetamines. I consider meth to be a real danger to society and I have no problem with any measures to stop it's use.

Michael Frazier

[GSWarrior]

What about the hundreds of thousands of pot smokers who have never tried heroin and never will?

[HamiltonJay]

The issue isn't is it biologically a gateway... the fact is psychologically it is.. and there is no doubt about it.

A habitual pot smoker may be no more or less likely to become addicted to Heroine than someone who has never touched the stuff if they both smoke it.... but odds are that the liklihood of the pot smoker trying the heroine in the first place are significantly higher.

I know the flaming will begin, but case study after case study bares this out.