Ugh. Robert DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health and former head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, took to the New York Times yesterday to trot out a bunch of old, bad science on pot being a gateway drug.
In the article, part of the Times‘ “Room for Debate” section, DuPont spends a whole lot of time citing statistics that appear to prove a connection between pot use and the use of harder drugs, all while failing to mention the huge fucking grain of salt with which one should take those statistics: correlation does not equal causation.
Yes, studies do show that people who use heroin tend to be current or former pot users. But no, that does not mean that smoking pot makes people heroin addicts. In fact, by the NIDA’s own admission, “the majority of people who use marijuana do not go on to use other, ‘harder’ substances.”
Perhaps if DuPont was attempting to prove a connection between pot use and “movie theater butter” popcorn addiction, I would buy it, but saying that pot is contributing to the heroin epidemic is dangerously far off. Especially when most of the emerging science (“emerging” thanks in part to the NIDA, incidentally) points to cannabis as a potential aid for opiate addicts looking to kick the habit. As one of DuPont’s fellow “Room for Debate” commentators, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Colleen Barry, notes, opiate overdoses have actually fallen in states that legalized medical marijuana.
Speaking of counterarguments, Newsweek published a great piece by Miriam Boeri, an associate professor of sociology at Bentley University, that basically rips DuPont’s flimsy arguments to shreds. Had it not come out the day before, I’d almost think it was a rebuttal.
In the piece, titled “Marijuana Is Not, Repeat Not, a Gateway Drug,” Boeri not only refutes DuPont’s claims (and Chris Christie’s, Marty Walsh’s, and a host of other science-deniers), but also goes to great lengths to answer the really important question here: Why are we still hearing this bullshit? Because, she says, the current cannabis research situation is, at best, a negative feedback loop and, at worst, a shady racket. As she explains:
In the United States, addiction researchers and addiction treatment professionals are heavily invested in the weakly supported claim that marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs. For decades, scientists who study addiction have received millions of dollars in government and pharmaceutical funding to perpetuate the gateway hypothesis. Many would lose their respected reputations (or continued funding) if a gateway mechanism is not a legitimate research goal.
Those who work in the vast addiction treatment profession are especially invested in keeping the gateway theory believable, since the majority of their treatment patients are marijuana users. Their jobs depend on a belief in addiction as a disease and on marijuana being an addictive drug.
Worth noting here, is the fact that DuPont, when he was head of the NIDA, was a major gatekeeper for cannabis research. And clearly a biased one.
You should read Boeri’s whole piece, but two of her points bear repeating here: 1) “other research notes that criminalization and prohibition are real gateways to harder drugs,” and 2) “studies consistently find that the traumatic experience of being arrested and incarcerated for marijuana possession is the most harmful aspect of marijuana among young people.”
Perhaps this would also be an appropriate moment to remind ourselves of something Shilo Murphy, the director of Seattle’s own sensible drug policy powerhouse, the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, has been telling us for years: The stigma around drug use is more harmful than the drugs themselves. As he once told me in an interview:
Telling a person that they’re a bad person never helps them. Demonizing people is not how we build a better world. That’s the world that Trump wants to live in. Data has shown that people use drugs less in healthy communities. If you want drug use to end, stop traumatizing children, stop having gun violence in schools, stop sending people to war and then not supporting them when they get home. Statistically, the likelihood of you being an everyday drug user has nothing to do with the drugs themselves, it has to do with trauma. But we don’t want to deal with the trauma, we want to deal with the symptom.