...in which I am unconvinced.
You can never, ever, trust anything the government tells you about illegal drugs. You just can’t. They lie like crazy, ‘cause if they were ever honest, we’d all immediately demand an end to the drug war, and they really like the drug war, ‘cause it costs lots of money and provides an excuse to do all sorts of horrible things to people. Plus, it gives every politician an opportunity to look “tough on crime” by demonizing a segment of the population that is largely inoffensive but is also unchampioned and defenseless.
Fifty and sixty years ago, when most folks didn’t know anything about marijuana, they pretended that it turned people into psycho-killer sex fiends (they still say this about other drugs, of course), and many people believed it. But by the seventies, when I was a kid, everybody knew this was ridiculous. Pot doesn’t drive you to Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence. Pot makes you sit on the couch grinning ‘til your face hurts. It makes you talk about stupid shit and listen to Pink Floyd records and giggle. Stoners are many things, but one thing they clearly aren’t is dangerous.
So they needed some new scare tactics. One of these was the idea that marijuana was a “gateway” drug, that it would lead to the abuse of harder drugs which people still believed stupid things about. Insofar as this is true (and I am not convinced), I always figured the obvious reason for it was that, to get pot, you often had to go to seedy and dangerous places where harder drugs were also in use. If you could buy a box of Js down at the 7-11, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Well, there’s been a new study that might possibly indicate that marijuana is, in fact, a gateway drug. The study didn’t track marijuana users to discover if they also got into LSD and cocaine, which is the obvious way to do it. Instead, they got some rats hooked on drugs.
What they did was, they gave a group of rats injections of THC every day for three weeks. The rats got used to feeling good, of course. Then they put those rats, and also a control group of non-pothead rats, into cages where they could push a lever and get heroin whenever they wanted it. I don’t know how they came up with a rat-friendly form of heroin, but I would have liked to have been there.
Anyway, so both groups discovered the heroin at the same time, and both really dug it. But it turned out that the stoner rats liked it more (that is, got it more often), by about 25%, which is a non-trivial number.
Still, I’m not convinced that this experiment proved anything. In the first place, it doesn’t indicate that the pot-rats are more likely to use heroin (which was supposed to be the point), only that they use more of it. The doctors who conducted the study aren’t convinced, either. While saying that the results are interesting, they pointed out that more studies would have to be done before anything definitive could really be said on the issue. Among other things, they would have to try the test using different baits for the rats. One doctor’s comments amounted to, “Maybe they just got used to feeling good, and were happy to find something else that could make them feel good. Maybe the results would have been the same if we’d been offering them sugar. Maybe the test rats would have been 25% more likely to go for Froot Loops or something, too.”
And my point is this: please tell me they aren’t gonna conduct experiments to see whether marijuana use increases the desire for Froot Loops. ‘Cause, dude, I can answer that question for you right now and save everyone a lot of time and expense, okay?