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Marijuana theory challenged
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A NEW study is challenging the idea that marijuana is a "gateway" to harder drug use, saying that appears to have been true only for the baby boom generation.
Writing in February's issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson of the National Development and Research Institutes in New York said young people who smoked marijuana in the generations before and after the baby boomers do not appear necessarily likely to go on to use harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
Golub and Johnson analyzed data collected as part of the federal National Household Drug Survey from 1979 to 1997 to see if young people who used marijuana were at risk for moving on to harder drugs, as had been widely feared, reported The Washington Post on Monday.
"Progression to marijuana and hard drug use was uncommon among persons born before World War Two," the researchers found. That occurred only among baby boomers, peaking around 1960.
The researchers said these findings suggest that the gateway phenomenon reflects norms prevailing among youths at a specific place and time and that the linkages between stages are far from casual.
(Xinhua)
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