A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health has challenged the so-called “gateway theory” and suggests that people born after the 1960s are less likely than baby boomers to progress from using marijuana to hard drugs.
The Substance Abuse Policy Research Program (SAPRP) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the study, which was led by Andrew Golub, Ph.D., of the National Development and Research Institute.
“Our study shows that children born before World War II rarely ever progressed to hard substances, and those born since the early 1970s were only about half as likely to progress from marijuana to cocaine powder, crack or heroin, than those who were born in the 1960s,” Golub said. “Most importantly, all indications are that the rate of progression to harder drugs may be continuing to decline even today.”
He continued, “A careful analysis of all of the data suggests that the gateway phenomenon characterized the drug use subculture of some baby boomers, but does not apply in the same manner to the generation that started using marijuana in the mid-1990s.”
The researches analyzed data from more than 100,000 respondents from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse from 1979 to 1997.
In 1999, a report presented by the Institute of Medicine entitled “Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base,” concluded that there is no “evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent use of other illicit drugs.”
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, NORML Foundation Executive Director at (202) 483-8751.
