The Science of Addiction by Carlton K. Erickson

Author:Carlton K. Erickson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The Gateway Drug Theory

Given all the evidence to date, the gateway drug theory has not been proven (reviewed in Erickson, 2011). In general, pharmacology as a discipline has been asking for more hard evidence that the use of a “soft” drug (e.g., cannabis) promotes escalation of drug use to “harder” drugs (e.g., heroin). Social scientists and epidemiologists, who look more at social use and drug use patterns, tend to be more open to the idea that the use of soft drugs leads to the use of harder drugs. The big problem is that cause and effect are very difficult to prove, since there are so many variables in why, when, and how people use multiple types of drugs. An example of research in this area, in which the researchers concluded that “a large proportion of individuals who use cannabis go on to use other illegal drugs,” illustrates the difficulty of such studies in controlling all the experimental variables (Secades-Villa, Garcia-Rodriquez, Jin, Wang, & Blanco, 2015).

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