America Doesn’t Understand Gateway Drugs
Everything my teen self knew about gateway drugs, I learned from a frying pan and a college basketball player.
They were both tentpoles of the “Just say no” heyday in the 1980s and ’90s, beamed into my brain through after-school television or guest speakers at school assemblies. The frying pan played the part of a drug in an extended-metaphor public-service announcement in which my brain was an egg. The college basketball player, Len Bias, served as an oft-cited cautionary tale after his death from an overdose (of what, my assembly speakers were not specific).
[Read: Another shocking opioid statistic]
Together they warned a generation of the pitfalls of even a single instance of substance use. Once the gateway had been opened, only ruin could follow.
Even though, the teen entry point for psychoactive-substance use has shifted away from cigarettes and alcohol and toward cannabis. That stands in opposition to the long-held belief that kids discover weed after experiences with alcohol and tobacco, and that making the transition to marijuana then sends them down a path toward harder drugs.
