Trying pain pills is three times more likely to lead to regular hard drug use than trying marijuana.

One of the most frustrating arguments presented by supporters of prohibition is the “Marijuana is a Gateway Drug” trope. The idea here is when you ask a heroin, cocaine, or meth addict “what was the first drug you ever tried?”, they inevitably answer “marijuana”. Therefore, the gateway theory goes, sparking up that first joint will begin the long slippery slide into crippling drug addiction.

It does not matter that government researchers have already declared in 1999 that “There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs“. The “gateway” theory is one of those urban legends that is proving very difficult to kill.

However, an analysis of the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that your first aspirin is more likely to be your gateway to hard drugs than your first joint.

We cross-referenced the NSDUH numbers based on whether someone had ever tried marijuana. We found that only 1.5% of people who have toked became monthly cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, meth, heroin, LSD, and PCP, less than 1% of the people who’ve tried pot are using those drugs regularly. Meanwhile, 2.9% of the people who’ve ever tried an legal analgesic (pain reliever) are regular cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, and meth, more than 1% of who tried analgesics are regular users. People who tried analgesics are more than twice as likely as people who tried pot to use heroin regularly and three times more likely to use LSD regularly.

We also find that binge drinkers – defined as 5 or more drinks at a sitting at least once a month – are more likely to be regular hard drug users than people who have tried marijuana. To be fair, alcohol supporters might point out that comparing regular beer use to one-time pot use is unfair, and when compared to regular marijuana users, beer users have 1/2 to 1/3 the hard drug regular use rates. In response, we’d say that regular beer drinkers don’t have to pick up a six pack from an illegal dealer who also sells other drugs.

But if opponents want to cling to the idea that we should do everything in our power to stop someone from smoking that first marijuana joint, lest they become illegal drug addicts, then it is time to prohibit Vicodin, Lortab, Lorcet, and Oxycontin, those powerful legal opioid pain killers. The first Vicodin/Lortab/Lorcet leads to almost three times the risk of becoming a non-pot illegal drug user than the first joint amd almost the same risk as smoking a joint every month. That first Oxycontin is more than five times the risk for drug abuse than the first joint.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Mexican Government has allowed domestic marijuana and opium production to climb to record levels. Current Mexican President, Philpe Calderon has been in office since 2006 and has tackled his country’s drug problem with military techniques, a tactic that activists have said is partially responsible for the thousands of deaths at the hands of powerful drug cartels. Military troops that were once used to cut and burn the illegal crops, are now patrolling the streets in cities and towns where the violence associated with drug trafficking has gotten out of hand. Since the military forces are now being used to wage urban warfare against the criminal gangs, the fields of poppies and acreages of marijuana have grown relatively free, tucked away in low population areas of the country.

More here:

Mexican Drug War Being Waged in Urban Areas

(AOL Opinion) I was a drug user for many years — if I could smoke, snort or inject it, I would do it. My addiction to opiates led to physical dependence and homelessness, so I am certainly familiar with the culture of AA meetings and in-patient drug rehabs. Funnily enough, none of the ex-addict drug counselors I ever talked to gave credence to the whole “gateway theory” of pot. They were addicts and placed blame for their condition strictly on “the disease” — that hazily understood mix of genetics and brain chemistry — rather than some long-ago, youthful puff on a joint.

No, the truth is that not many people who have actually smoked marijuana on a regular basis give any credence to the idea that it can lead to harder drugs. In fact, many claim that it can have the opposite effect. Seven years ago, when I was detoxing from my decade-long addiction to heroin and methadone, it was marijuana that I turned to when the depression, the insomnia and the urge to use heroin were almost unbearably strong. I certainly felt better about using something natural like marijuana for these protracted withdrawal symptoms than the hard-core antidepressants that the doctors were offering me.

The idea of an “addiction” to marijuana is laughable, too. There can be no physical dependence to weed, and when people talk about being “addicted to marijuana” this says more about the abuse of the word “addiction” in today’s world than anything about the psychopharmacology of the plant itself.

Do you agree?  I know the first drug I tried was alcohol at age 16.  By age 21 I was a beer-chugging shot-chasing alcoholic.  At age 22 I discovered cannabis and almost immediately my alcohol use declined.

But I also discovered I had been lied to regarding the effects of cannabis, so I was much more cavalier about accepting offers of other drugs.  By age 25 I was a meth addict living in a trailer.  An emergency hospital stay convinced me to kick meth, but those days when the withdrawals were the worst I found that a nice bowl of cannabis made everything OK.

What’s your story?  Have you found cannabis to be an “exit drug” from hard drugs and pharmaceuticals?  Let us know in the comments section and your story could be (anonymously) added to one of my rants on NORML SHOW LIVE.

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1. Students sickened by possible heroin-laced brownies thought to be pot brownies
2. Washington State taking another look at decrim and legalization
3. Virginia Delegate Harvey Morgan, MD, faces ridicule for his pro-medical marijuana stance

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1. San Diego collective manager Jovan Jackson found not guilty
2. Natural cannabis extracts proven superior to THC alone for intractable cancer pain
3. California Sheriff: “Part of me wants marijuana legalized”

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Somewhere in Georgia, Rep. Tommy “Caning for Potheads” Benton is calling the Taliban weak for their light treatment of marijuana users…

(“Seeds of Terror” by Gretchen Peters) The Taliban dropped a bruised, shivering wretch at our feet, his legs in shackles.  “This is what we do to addicts”, declared Abdul Rashed, head of their anti-drug force in Kandahar.  It was Spring of 1997, I had traveled to the southern Afghan city, then the Taliban’s de facto capital, with the Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashed.  I was writing a story about the opium trade for the AP, Ahmed was researching his book “The Taliban” which would become an overnight best-seller after the 9/11 attacks.  We met the counter-narcotics chief in his shoebox sized office.  I made a joke about how the 2 men might be related since they shared the same last name, neither man found it funny.  Ahmed was meticulously turned out in an Italian sports coat, his namesake picked bits of food from his greasy beard while he explained the Taliban’s unique approach to curing drug addiction.

First he said addicts got beaten until they confess the name of their supplier, after that they were thrown in jail.  “Then we dunk them in ice cold water for 2 or 3 hours a day”, Rashed explained.  Adding brightly, “it’s a very good cure”, to prove his point he ordered his minions to drag out Bak Mohammad, a local shopkeeper recently caught smoking a joint.  “When they put me in that cold water I forgot all about hashish” said Mohammad, slumped on the floor before us.

The irony here, of course, is that the Taliban is almost completely funded by the cultivation of opium and trafficking in heroin worldwide.  Afghans don’t really use heroin, so the religious fanatics of the Taliban don’t seem to mind growing it to poison the infidel.  But Afghans love their cannabis and hash, so the Taliban plays DEA whenever marijuana is involved.

(RedOrbit) Injections of THC, the active principle of cannabis, eliminate dependence on opiates (morphine, heroin) in rats deprived of their mothers at birth. This has been shown by a study carried out by Valérie Daugé and her team at the Laboratory for Physiopathology of Diseases of the Central Nervous System (UPMC / CNRS / INSERM) in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The findings could lead to therapeutic alternatives to existing substitution treatments.

Previously, Daugé and her colleagues had shown that rats deprived of their mothers at birth become hypersensitive to the rewarding effect of morphine and heroin (substances belonging to the opiate family), and rapidly become dependent. In addition, there is a correlation between such behavioral disturbances linked to dependence, and hypoactivity of the enkephalinergic system, the endogenous opioid system.

To these rats, placed under stress from birth, the researchers intermittently administered increasingly high doses of THC (5 or 10 mg/kg) during the period corresponding to their adolescence (between 35 and 48 days after birth). By measuring their consumption of morphine in adulthood, they observed that, unlike results previously obtained, the rats no longer developed typical morphine-dependent behavior. Moreover, biochemical and molecular biological data corroborate these findings. In the striatum, a region of the brain involved in drug dependence, the production of endogenous enkephalins was restored under THC, whereas it diminished in rats stressed from birth which had not received THC.

Ah, the possibility that marijuana doesn’t lead to heroin, it may lead away from heroin!  Put this in the Hall of Fame with Michael Phelps killing the amotivational slacker myth, Barack Obama slaying the admitted marijuana users can’t get elected rule, and Dr. Tashkin searching for a link to marijuana and lung cancer and instead finding anti-tumoral properties.

The evil thing is to think of how much our government already suspects many of these medical marijuana miracles (they knew about the anti-tumoral properties of THC since the 1970s) and has actively been suppressing all attempts to research the good marijuana can do (plenty of money for “demon weed” research, however.)

(WOAI.com) SAN ANTONIO — Controversy is brewing over a patch used for pain relief. At least two people in San Antonio have died after using the Fentanyl patch, and their families are blaming what they say is a defect.

Like most medicinal patches, Fentanyl is used by peeling off a sticky side and placing it against the skin of a patient. The patch is left on the skin for up to 72 hours and is supposed to provide the exact amount of medication needed.

However, the families of two San Antonio women who died say the patch they were prescribed to relieve their pain ended up killing them.

According to lawsuits filed by family members, both women suffered chronic pain. So, their doctors suggested Fentanyl patches.

Fentanyl is stronger than morphine. When it is applied to the skin, it then delivers a certain amount of Fentanyl into the patient.

While wearing the patches, Donna Singleton and Ellen Burks died. Their families say both suffered an overdose of Fentanyl because the patches were defective.

Similar patches have been recalled before because a cut along the side of the patch allowed too much Fentanyl to leak and cause a possible overdose.

Wait a minute, didn’t the Food & Drug Administration approve the use of these Fentanyl patches?  Why, doesn’t that mean it’s safe?  We know for sure that the FDA wouldn’t let people stick a patch on their body loaded with a Schedule II drug if it weren’t safe, even if this Fentanyl is just one isomer short of being Schedule I “China White” heroin.

We know this because they protect us from that evil Schedule I medical marijuana that never killed anybody in 5,000 years.

When I worked for our government in support of these efforts in the early 1990′s, drug producers would go into a village, often after executing someone as an example, and conscript the village residents into manufacturing marijuana, cocaine, or opiates. Today, they are still hard at work conscripting residents and forcing them to manufacture their illegal drugs.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a strong proponent for legal marijuana, but I’m adamantly against the purchase or distribution of “cartel schwag” because there are innocents who die at the hands of the cartels. I would rather ‘never smoke pot again’ than line the pockets of cartels with my money. I’m hoping that someday, it will all be domestic.

I left government service a little more than a year ago, after serving more than 20 years wearing a uniform. In my senior military days, I dealt with policy and strategy, creating different solutions for different issues. Today I spend my time working policy and strategy for a University while working to influence legalization policies through letter writing and blogging.

During my research I came across a paper written by Ross Raffin which describes, in his opinion, how the current legalization movement is being done in a Federal way. He articulates quite accurately what the Obama administration is doing for the legalization movement.

Standford Progressive,

Many advocates of legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana feel Obama has abandoned them. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a consistent warrior against decriminalization. Attorney General Eric Holder has a history of opposing drug policy reforms and considers the adult use of marijuana equivalent to public nuisance. Even Joe Biden, when asked about pain management and medical cannabis, responded that “there’s got to be a better answer than marijuana.” But the reality is that the Obama administration has turned the tides in favor of legalization and decriminalization in a much stronger and subtler way than open rhetorical endorsements.

Optimism for drug reform began when Obama ended federal raids on cannabis dispensaries in states which allow medical marijuana. What marijuana advocates fail to realize is that with this the Obama administration initiated a small but extremely important step towards legalization. More importantly, it has done so in a way to insulate itself from Republican attacks and attempts to distract the public.

If Obama were to walk up to a microphone today and announce that he is going to submit legislation to congress to tax, regulate, and legalize marijuana, we might have a Congress ready to impeach, or at the very least, we’d have a  Congress who wouldn’t take him seriously any longer.

The Obama administration’s public hesitation towards marijuana legalization is not only understandable but, considering the impact of the current economic legislation and programs the administration is endorsing, the most pragmatic and efficient route for the moment. Legalization and decriminalization advocates should focus efforts on state-wide legalization, not nation-wide. If states are challenged in lawsuits, than the Supreme Court will be forced to rule on whether legislation criminalizing marijuana should be struck down. This is preferable to the executive putting forward a proposal to legalize marijuana from the top down. When Obama tells the country that marijuana legalization is not the path he chooses for America, he means to say that the path must first be drawn by us.

What we need to do, as a point of policy and strategy, is continue what we are doing right now. At the grass roots level, we need to be even more active in our local NORML chapters, and try as hard as we can by rallying as much support as possible to support any and all decriminalization bills or propositions in our communities and states as we can.

Our president is allowing democracy to decide the fate of marijuana, so let’s use democracy to end the prohibition and re-legalize marijuana. Start a NORML chapter, or attend a meeting and get active! It’s a chance for you to serve your country.

96% of BEST drug seizures at the Mexican border are marijuana

(Counterpunch.org) DHS says the new initiative will be based on a “risk-based decision-making process.” All the various DHS initiatives that are part of its SBI umbrella program contend that they are “risk-based.” DHS contends it is protecting the homeland against “dangerous goods and people.”

In practice, however, its array of border control and immigration enforcement programs casts a wide net—with most of the arrests being immigration violators and drug law offenders rather than dangerous criminals. Marijuana leads, by far, the list of illegal drugs seized, even though there is widening consensus, even in the criminal justice community, that marijuana is not a “dangerous good,” especially when compared with cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines.

The achievements of the existing [Border Enforcement Security Taskforce] BEST teams don’t support ICE declarations that their investigation and prosecutions are “risk-based.” The existing 95 members of BEST teams in the Southwest were responsible for 1,000 criminal arrests in 2008, but most of its arrests—1,256—were for administrative violations, presumably transgressions of immigration law. Marijuana seizures topped the list of drugs confiscated. BEST seized 42,400 lbs. of marijuana, 1,803 lbs. of cocaine, and 66 lbs. of heroin.

Do you feel safer now?  When President Nixon declared the war on drugs, one of the first programs on the Mexican border was “Operation Intercept“.  Then, too, the idea was that we’d stop those Mexicans from supplying weed to our youth.  The massive crackdown was called off after Mexican officials complained about how badly this backed up legitimate business traffic at the border.

In this case, it’s not just business traffic inconveniences to worry about, it’s potential terrorists and explosive or radioactive materials we’re worried about.  Every time border cops have to spend time busting truckloads of pot is an opportunity for a terrorist to go unnoticed.