aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Cigarettes: the real gateway drug

The Today Show just had a report on how preliminary indications are that local cigarette smoking bans have positive health effects. The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the U.S.’s leading addiction researchers, Nora Volkow, interviewed on Fresh Air the other day, suggests we may find yet another benefit from such bans:

GROSS: So, you know, a lot of people say, `Well, marijuana is a gateway drug.’ Do you see it differently? Do you think, like, for somebody who’s prone to using drugs, who has that kind of like, you know, the right kind of dopamine receptors and genetics and everything, that for them getting started on marijuana might lead to other drugs, but it’s not something inherent about marijuana as a gateway drug?

Dr. VOLKOW: Well, I would put it differently. I would basically bring forward that two are possible, and also I would like to take one step behind and say, before marijuana, what studies have shown that appears preceding marijuana is nicotine. So actually very early experimentation with cigarettes increases the likelihood that then you will experiment with marijuana and that then you will experiment with other drugs. So it’s not just the concept of marijuana being the gateway drug, but the possibility that early exposure to certain drugs, and what are the drugs that young people are more likely to get access if you’re a child? They’re much more likely to get cigarettes than it is to get marijuana.

We’re trying to understand actually whether, indeed, in a person that may not have the genetic vulnerability, that, because of an environment that’s very permissive, they get access to cigarettes, and they smoke. Would that in and of itself increase the risk of taking other drugs, or is it that they have the genetic vulnerability that made them want to experiment very early on?

Emphasis mine.