Category Archives: Gateway Drug

Addiction, Gateway Drug

Marijuana and Other Drugs: A Link We Can’t Ignore

by SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana)   Smart Approaches to Marijuana’s 2017 publication references academic studies which suggest that marijuana primes the brain for other types of drug usage.  Here’s the summary on that subject from page 4, Marijuana and Other Drugs: A Link We Can’t Ignore :

MORE THAN FOUR in 10 people who ever use marijuana will go on to use other illicit drugs, per a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.(1) The CDC also says that marijuana users are three times more likely to become addicted to heroin.(2)

Although 92% of heroin users first used marijuana before going to heroin, less than half used painkillers before going to heroin.

And according to the seminal 2017 National Academy of Sciences report, “There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and the development of substance dependence and/or a substance abuse disorder for substances including alcohol, tobacco, and other illicit drugs.”(3)

RECENT STUDIES WITH animals also indicate that marijuana use is connected to use and abuse of other drugs. A 2007 Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology study found that rats given THC later self administered heroin as adults, and increased their heroin usage, while those rats that had not been treated with THC maintained a steady level of heroin intake.(4) Another 2014 study found that adolescent THC exposure in rats seemed to change the rodents’ brains, as they subsequently displayed “heroin-seeking” behavior. Youth marijuana use could thus lead to “increased vulnerability to drug relapse in adulthood.”(5)

National Institutes of Health Report

The National Institutes of Health says that research in this area is “consistent with animal experiments showing THC’s ability to ‘prime’ the brain for enhanced responses to other drugs. For example, rats previously administered THC show heightened behavioral response not only when further exposed to THC, but also when exposed to other drugs such as morphine—a phenomenon called cross-sensitization.”(6)

Suggestions that one addictive substance replaces another ignores the problem of polysubstance abuse, the common addiction of today.

ADDITIONALLY, THE MAJORITY of studies find that marijuana users are often polysubstance users, despite a few studies finding limited evidence that some people substitute marijuana for opiate medication. That is, people generally do not substitute marijuana for other drugs. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences report found that “with regard to opioids, cannabis use predicted continued opioid prescriptions 1 year after injury.  Finally, cannabis use was associated with reduced odds of achieving abstinence from alcohol, cocaine, or polysubstance use after inpatient hospitalization and treatment for substance use disorders” [emphasis added].(7)

Moreover, a three-year 2016 study of adults also found that marijuana compounds problems with alcohol. Those who reported marijuana use during the first wave of the survey were more likely than adults who did not use marijuana to develop an alcohol use disorder within three years.(8) Similarly, alcohol consumption in Colorado has increased slightly since legalization. (9)

Data on Marijuana Policy for 2017

Here’s the complete Data on Marijuana Policy for 2017 in pdf form.

FOOTNOTES:

  1. Secades-Villa R, Garcia-Rodríguez O, Jin CJ, Wang S, Blanco C Probability and predictors of the cannabis gateway effect: a national study. Int J Drug Policy. 2015;26(2):135-142

2. Centers for Disease Control. Today’s heroin epidemic Infographics more people at risk, multiple drugs abused. CDC, 7 July 2015.

3. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health andPublic Health Practice; Committee on the Health Effects of Marijuana: An Evidence Review and Research Agenda (“2017 NAS Report”).

4. Ellgren, Maria et al. “Adolescent Cannabis Exposure Alters Opiate Intake and Opioid Limbic Neuronal Populations in Adult Rats.”Neuropsychopharmacology 32.3 (2006): 607–615.

5. Stropponi, Serena et al. Chronic THC during adolescence increases the vulnerability to stress-induced relapse to heroin seeking in adult rats. European Neuropsychopharmacology Volume 24 , Issue 7 (2014), 1037 – 1045.

6. “Is marijuana a gateway drug?” National Institute on Drug Abuse. Jan. 2017. See also Panlilio LV, Zanettini C, Barnes C, Solinas M, Goldberg SR. Prior exposure to THC increases the addictive effects of nicotine in rats. Neuropsychopharmacol Off Publ Am Coll Neuropsychopharmacol. 2013;38(7):1198-1208; Cadoni C, Pisanu A, Solinas M, Acquas E, Di Chiara G. Behavioural sensitization after repeated exposure to Delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cross-sensitization with morphine. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2001;158(3):259-266.

7.  2017 NAS report.

8.  Weinberger AH, Platt J, Goodwin RD. Is cannabis use associated with an increased risk of onset and persistence of alcohol use disorders? A three-year prospective study among adults in the United States. Drug Alcohol Depend. February 2016.

This is the second recent article on the gateway effects of marijuana use.   Since marijuana has already primed the brains of most people who get addicted to opioids, marijuana cannot replace pain pills.

Addiction, Gateway Drug

Marijuana Can’t Substitute for Pain Pills

The pot industry pushes marijuana use as a substitute for pain pills.  With a massive Public Relations effort, it uses the media to do its bidding.  However  — upon closer examination — the opiate and heroin epidemic mirror the legalization of marijuana.

The Opioid Commission headed by Governor Chris Christie should not pause one second to consider marijuana as a substitute for pain medication.  Save Our Society from Drugs asks that we petition this group not to consider marijuana as a treatment for pain.

Why So Much Chronic Pain?

Not everyone who becomes addicted to opiates started because of pain.  Those under age 35 who are dying from drug abuse at an unprecedented rate, often started abusing drugs just for fun.

People usually don’t get addicted to opiates by taking them as pain medications, according to Jon Daily, of Recovery Happens, outpatient addiction treatment centers in California.  He explains that the pain pills given after surgery and taken as prescribed, won’t produce a high for most people.  However, there’s a subset of people who respond differently and feel euphoria.  The difference for these people may be that they’re responding to unresolved issues of painful experience earlier in their lives.

Dr. Libby Stuyt, addictions psychiatrist and advisor to Parents Opposed to Pot said: “Most patients with chronic pain issues find that holding onto emotional pain from past trauma comes out in the form of physical pain.  When they work through this and are able to let go, the physical pain greatly diminishes.”

Too much medical intervention and surgery is also an issue.  Ten years ago Shannon Brownlee wrote Overtreated: How Too Much Medicine is Making us Sicker and Poorer, and now people are noticing that overtreatment create problems.

A wise Chinese doctor said:  “When a body has an imbalance, which is displayed in the form of some or other dis-ease, it will continue to display this imbalance.  If we cut out the place where that imbalance is currently occurring, then chances are, it will simply move to the next area of the body.”    It could be that unnecessary surgeries and too many surgeries contributed to chronic pain and the addiction problem.

Why People Get Addicted to Opiates

According to Jon Daily, most people in his practice begin pain pill abuse because they were already using alcohol and marijuana.  Their relationship with getting intoxicated began through these substances.  It is why Daily recommends an addiction paradigm shift away from heroin to marijuana.

Studies show that only about six percent of the population gets addicted to pain pills after surgery.   A recent study shows that states with the highest drug abuse are also the states that have legalized marijuana.

Overprescribing by doctors was a major issue in the past, but it is not the major issue today.   If pot is recommended as an alternative to avoid opioid addiction, it will probably be the same pill mill doctors who will be giving such recommendations. 

We believe the future of pain medicine is not prescribing marijuana, but in utilizing alternatives that treat the root of the pain.  Some of these techniques may need to be combined with Dialectical Behavior Therapy or Cognitive Behavior Therapy and spiritual help.   Cannabis, a psychotropic plant, is anything but “natural.”

Marijuana lobbyists have played a trick on America’s children by using the green pharmaceutical cross and pretending to be doctors.  They insist marijuana is “not a gateway” drug, but studies show otherwise.

Let’s push back on the pot industry’s promotion of marijuana as a cure-all drug and the media’s advocacy on their behalf.   Remember, “medical” marijuana was planned as a hoax.

The United States uses 80 percent of the world’s opiate pain pills.  The United States and Canada have 56% of the world’s illegal drug users.   Polydrug use is the rule today and marijuana is usually part of the drug cocktail.

Prevention and Treatment

There are many other ways to treat the opiate epidemic:  better prevention programs; mandating education in the schools; clamping down on internet sellers of these drugs, and reversing America’s constant craving to be high.

As for using drugs to treat an addiction, this practice is questionable.  What works for some will not work for others. Perhaps long-acting naltrexone (Vivitrol)  which blocks the effects of opiates, and apparently the craving, can help.  Let’s hope Governor Christie’s Commission devises some good recommendations.

Addiction, Gateway Drug

Mathematics Proves Correlation to Marijuana as Gateway Drug

Two Studies Show Cannabis-Gateway Effect

by Pamela McColl, SAM Canada

The 25-year Christchurch Longitudinal Study demonstrated that in 86% of cases of those who had taken two or more illegal drugs, marijuana had been the drug the study subjects had taken first. The correlation is in the mathematics and can’t be denied.

The researchers concluded that the use of marijuana in late adolescence and early adulthood had emerged as the strongest risk factor for later involvement in other illicit drug use.

New research has been released that adds to these findings. Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK has found regular and occasional cannabis use as a teen is associated with a greater risk of other illicit drug taking in early adulthood.

The study by Bristol’s Population Health Science Institute, published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2017, caught the attention of most major newspapers in the UK.  It was reviewed in the British Medical Journal and Science Daily in June of 2017.    But, once again, the news was under-reported in the North American media.

Cannabis Use Predicts Many Forms of Problematic Substance Use in Adulthood

Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), the researchers looked at levels of cannabis use during adolescence to determine whether these  might predict other problematic substance misuse in early childhood – by the age of 21.

In addition to the findings on pot and illicit drug use, the study found that early cannabis use was associated with harmful drinking and smoking.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Michelle Taylor from the School of Social and Community Medicine told the UK media: “I think the most important findings from this study are that one in five adolescents follow a pattern of occasional or regular cannabis use and that those individuals are more likely to be tobacco-dependent, have harmful levels of alcohol consumption or use other, illicit drugs in early adulthood.”

Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient:

Now for all those that are still question the Gateway Theory or are willing to dismiss the evidence from these studies here is the Statistical Mathematical Evidence of Correlation:

A survey that was conducted in Canada and 9 other countries was used to determine the percentage of teenagers who had used marijuana and other drugs.

Using Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient to test the correlation between the two variables as extracted from the population as pairs of sets of data, it was mathematically demonstrated that there is a positive correlation between the two variables.

The claim that there is a positive correlation between smoking marijuana and doing other drugs is made with at least a 95% level of confidence by mathematical calculation.

If after this evidence you still cling to the position that the Gateway Theory is old-school and can be cast aside, you are being asked for your evidence, your proof and your calculations.

Follow Pamela McColl in Facebook at The Marijuana Victims Association

“Legalization would result only in more cannabis users and thus a higher secondary demand for and entanglement within the remaining illegal drug market,” wrote David Sergeant of The Bow Group, London, England.

Addiction, Gateway Drug, Testimonies

Cannabis Goes with Heroin Like Peaches and Cream

Author Explains why Heroin Users Need Their Pot

By Richard Adamski

Three Trees by Richard Adamski is available on Amazon.com

 I started smoking cannabis when I was aged 19 and smoked it for about thirty years.  For a period of about two years I took methamphetamine, originally ‘bombing’ it (putting the powdered drug tightly in a small piece of tissue or a rolling paper and swallowing it).  I progressed to injecting methamphetamine and became addicted to it for about 8 months.  At the time I was self-employed and could afford both drugs, namely meth and cannabis. It was when I got off methamphetamine that I started writing about drugs, particularly cannabis. I was still smoking cannabis then. To be honest the only reason I eventually stopped smoking cannabis and cigarettes is because I was diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Years of smoking both drugs caused my COPD.

Over the years I got to know and mixed with a lot of drug users and I asked them all the same question: ‘What was the first drug you took?’ and every reply was cannabis and they continued to smoke it while they took harder drugs. Without question, cannabis is the introductory drug to other drugs. Most drug users start with cannabis. No one has died from smoking cannabis but indirectly they have. I personally know four people who have died because of a heroin overdose and the first drug they took, and continued to take up to their deaths, was cannabis.

Why Cannabis Fits so Well with Class A Drugs

Cannabis goes well with Class A drugs, i.e. heroin and methamphetamine. For example: If you have a toot (burn off the foil) of heroin, then inhale cannabis, keep the smoke in your body for several seconds then exhale, the cannabis increases the heroin effect. Cannabis goes well while you’re buzzing on methamphetamine. Like heroin, when you come down off the drug, a cannabis joint lessens the withdrawal effect.

The side effects of excessive use of cannabis range from anxiety and paranoia to problems with attention, memory and coordination and while you continue to smoke cannabis you are keeping the illegal drug industry going. Cannabis and Class A drugs undeniably go together like peaches and cream. The only people who need cannabis are those who smoke it.

Some people may say that I’m a hypocrite in writing what I have done as I took drugs over a long period of time.  All I can say in my defense is that with taking drugs and mixing with and meeting drug users, I have seen how cannabis runs the drug show.

What about marijuana used as medicine?

There’s massive support for cannabis to be decriminalized or legalized and a lot of famous people support this action. In the UK the BMA (British Medical Association) voted overwhelmingly for cannabis to be made available for such as cancer and MS sufferers. A while ago there was a big national debate about cannabis and in one of the national newspapers there was a half-page photograph of an elderly MS sufferer with a cannabis joint in his mouth. To me that is setting a bad and dangerous example. ‘If he can smoke it, then why can’t I?’ and ‘It’s not doing him any harm so why should it me?’

If such as the MS sufferer could be medically supplied with cannabis in such as a tincture way (dissolved in alcohol), cake, organic yoghurt, as a pill and only available on prescription then that would shut him up and others like him of a similar persuasion. In my opinion cannabis should never be made legal in herbal, grass, weed, because it is in this form where the cannabis problems lie.

Broken Dreams and Death: Marijuana at 14, then heroin

I knew a young man named Ross who dealt cannabis and injected heroin. He didn’t deal heroin. He wasn’t an addict and took heroin and cannabis as recreational drugs. He died at the age off 22 because he had a bad hit of heroin. Whether it was cut with a bad substance I don’t know, but he was found dead in his flat with the needle still in his arm. Ross once told me: ‘I actually wanted to be a pilot in the RAF (Royal Air Force), but at the age of 14 I started smoking Ganga and that put an end to that.’

In my strong opinion, cannabis is the most dangerous drug because most people think it isn’t.

Richard Adamski is the author of Three Trees. Three Trees is a contemporary Wind in the Willows where woodland creatures act as humans do in the environment they live in.  An anti-drug theme runs throughout the story.  He lives in England.