Durham, NH: Age and unemployment, but not marijuana use, are most likely to be associated with an individual’s decision to use so-called ‘hard’ drugs, according to survey data published this month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Investigators at the University of New Hampshire tracked the use patterns of approximately 1,300 young adults who attended south Florida public schools in the 1990s. Researchers tracked the participants from enrollment in the sixth or seventh grade until they reached their late teens or early 20s.
Authors reported that the factors most likely to be associated with subjects’ progression to hard drug use were age, stress, and whether or not they were employed following high school.
“It really didn’t matter if someone used marijuana or not as a teen,” lead investigator Karen Van Gundy told the website Web MD.
Van Gundy also implied that criminalizing marijuana users could inadvertently drive individuals toward more serious illicit drug use. “If we overly criminalize behaviors like marijuana use among teens, this could interfere with opportunities for education and employment later on, which, in turn, could be creating more drug use,” she said.
A 2006 study by investigators at the University of Pittsburgh also reported that environmental factors and subjects’ “proneness to deviancy,” but not subjects’ marijuana use alone, were the two characteristics that most commonly predicted substance abuse later in life.
Commenting on the study, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “It is clear that there is nothing specific to the pharmacology of cannabis that increases the likelihood that marijuana users will progress to so-called harder drugs. However, it is clear that the culture surrounding marijuana prohibition – which inherently exposes marijuana consumers to pushers of other illicit substances – likely plays a role. This phenomenon strengthens the arguments in favor of regulating marijuana as a legal commodity for adults.”
For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, “A life-course perspective on the ‘gateway hypothesis,’ appears in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.