The people who blabber incessantly about weed being a gateway drug are the exact REASON that I agree with them, but we VERY much disagree on the specifics.

Think of it this way:

Every adult in your life has told you that weed is JUST AS BAD as heroin and cocain and meth. You hear it repeated ad nauseum, ESPECIALLY if you were in DARE.

Now one day someone you have known for a long time offers you some because "it's not that bad, trust me you'll be fine" and they go ahead and take a puff or twelve. Turns out it's not that bad. They were fine after some initial uncoordinated attempts at doing something.

So if weed is this interesting, maybe heroin isn't that bad either?

Yeah turns out heroin IS that bad, and lumping it in with weed is like tossing the kindergarten bully into a maxsec prison.

So yeah, it's only a "gAtEwAy dRuG" because you fucks lied for decades and made false equivalence of things and taught kids they can't trust you.

Weed is a gateway drug to the fridge.

What specifically stands out to you as a ridiculous bit of probaganda?

It's certainly not the most accurate or clinical, and some of the categories are a bit "eh", but nothing popped out to me that I would describe so strongly.

If nothing else, it's a lot more objective and grounded in reality than what they gave me in that dumb dare program. Might be why my reaction is just "close enough".

Marijuana is not a gateway drug.

Having to deal with a drug dealer that wants to also sell you actually addictive drugs is the gateway.

Legalize pot, sell it at the grocery store, and you will watch the number of addicts in general fall precipitously. I guarantee it.

The fact that LSD and shrooms are in the same category as PCP.

I have never in my life heard anyone actually call weed "dope."

"Dope" is heroin, and its derivatives and relations.

Yep that certainly is exactly the bullshit I was taught in the Midwest.

I wish schools were able to use the categories of “do your research” “probably a bad idea” and “definitely a bad idea”. There are drugs kids need to be warned about and by being honest about marijuana and lsd you build credibility when you tell them to never try opiates and that poppers may not ruin your life, but like there’s never a situation where they’re a good idea.

We also need to be honest about how we got into our opioid epidemic and how most heroin addicts got hooked after getting prescribed.

Kids are stupid but they aren’t stupid how us adults think they are. When we lie to them they remember to discount everything we say, even to not smoke cigarettes.

I get the sense that the author hasn't tried many or any of these substances and is trotting out the standard line. I didn't see alcohol, cigarettes and Oxycontin mentioned.

If we're going to have an adult conversation about addictive substances we should first talk about sugar and junk food. We should also discuss the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, lack of healthcare and community, ignorance of mental health, motor vehicles, pollution, the criminal justice system, Judeo-Christian culture and being a person of colour. Those will form the major risk factors for human health.

Where is the alcohol section that causes probably the most deaths per year?

GHB and rufies are used recreationally, not just for date rape.

The purpose of drug education programs in schools is to scare kids, not to genuinely educate kids so they can make informed decisions in their own lives. They also can't cover everything because the education system is fucked and drugs would require a semester to teach to an appropriate degree and serve harm reduction. They also need to not tell kids enough because it could backfire and make drugs seem interesting to try. Try making DMT not sound awesome.

The fact it still teaches the "gateway drug" shit tells me it's outdated as hell.

Your child is lucky to have you as a parent.

And they're making a fucking mess of the pharmacological and social definitions of "drug". It's the propaganda version of that "ackshyually tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable" brain-rotting idiocy.

Depressant, stimulant, those refer to the pharmacological activity; it'll include even things not socially considered as drugs, such as caffeine (stimulant) and alcohol (depressant). In this sense marijuana is not its own class, it's THC is a depressant.

That "club drugs" category is a fucking mess in both definitions. Ketamine is an anaesthetic, thus likely a depressant; ecstasy is mostly a stimulant with weak hallucinogen properties, pharmacologically they're nothing alike. And socially they're closer to caffeine (as things that you ingest willingly) than to date rape drugs (things that people give you against your consent).

And even the division in social drugs depends on usage. Marijuana for example can be used for clinical or recreative reasons; abuse is of course bad, but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if most marijuana smokers had better lungs than I do (I don't smoke weed but I smoke tobacco - nicotine is a ~~depressant~~ stimulant BTW). Same deal with the date rape drugs, alcohol could be used as one.

Aaaaah, sorry for the rant. What I want to convey is that yeah, I get why this infuriates you. It infuriated me too.

The “gateway” drug thing was taught to me through DARE in the 90s. But has been confirmed propoganda for decades. Calling Cannabis (marijuana is not the proper name) a “gateway” drug is like saying water or air are “gateway” drugs. Sure, a crack head has probably smoked weed, but that isn’t what got them into crack.

I would guess that these materials are, either, very old or they categorize cannabis differently because it is so common. It doesn’t help that it is illegal in half the country and legal in the other half. So any state with cannabis not, at least, decriminalized will still have the talking points for the 1930s.

They put pcp alongside shrooms and LSD. That's insane.

brb, going to the club with my friends so we can do steroids, hopefully I can find some psychotic marijuanas too

I remember my old boss asking me what the effects of cannabis were. I was like "which cannabis? Indica, sativa, high CBD, high thc, etc" Cannabis is like wine, but different strains have different effects. There are stains that I use at night that leave me happy and couch bound, and there are strains I use on a weekend morning that make me clean my entire house

Do they go on to mention any negative effects?

At least it's broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the 'continued' section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it's encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don't want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it's hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the "impairment" especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.