gate·way drug
noun
A habit-forming drug that, while not itself addictive, may lead to the use of other addictive drugs
Is there any evidence to suggest that people who try cannabis are more likely to try other drugs?
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Sign up to join this communitygate·way drug
noun
A habit-forming drug that, while not itself addictive, may lead to the use of other addictive drugs
Is there any evidence to suggest that people who try cannabis are more likely to try other drugs?
Hardcore drug users use cannabis, but there is no evidence that cannabis is a gateway drug. The first drugs that people are exposed to are usually nicotine and alcohol. Most hardcore drug users also use cannabis, which can make a study on hardcore drug users skewed, because many of them probably use cannabis first due to it's widespread availability.
In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a "gateway" drug. But because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, "gateway" to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs. An important caution is that data on drug use progression cannot be assumed to apply to the use of drugs for medical purposes. It does not follow from those data that if marijuana were available by prescription for medical use, the pattern of drug use would remain the same as seen in illicit use... (Joy et al. 1999)
Cannabis can be a gateway drug in one sense. Dealers who deal in cannabis try to sell their other drugs to users too.
Sources: From http://www.drugscience.org/sfu/sfu_gateway.html
http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v13/2/myths.html
Studies related to the gateway theory are listed on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_drug_theory#Studies_not_in_favor_of_the_gateway_theory