Cannabis likely to take teens to harder drugs, new study shows

Teenagers who frequently smoke cannabis are 26 times more likely to move on to harder drugs by the age of 21.

A groundbreaking new study by a British university concludes that cannabis is a gateway drug to “harder” substances such as cocaine, amphetamines, hallucinogens and heroin.

The findings put paid to suggestions from pro-marijuana advocates that cannabis is relatively harmless and should be legalised.

The odds of regular cannabis users smoking cigarettes was found to be 37 times higher than non-users while their risk of drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol was three times worse.

And teenagers who only smoked occasionally still had higher odds of getting hooked on other illegal drugs, smoking cigarettes and drinking excessively.

The findings were revealed by University of Bristol’s Dr Michelle Taylor, who studied cannabis use among more than 5,000 UK teenagers aged 13-18. One in five used cannabis.

‘Dabbling’

She tracked the influence their cannabis use had on their abuse of nicotine, alcohol and other drugs at 21 years old, and her work was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health

Amphetamines and cocaine were the most common drug for the pot-smoking teens to be dabbling with by that age.

“It has been argued that cannabis acts as a gateway to other drug use,” Dr Taylor said.

“However, historically the evidence has been inconsistent.

“The most important findings from this study are that one in five adolescents follow a pattern of occasional or regular cannabis use and that those individuals are more likely to be tobacco dependent, have harmful levels of alcohol consumption or use other illicit drugs in early adulthood.”

Speaking to Australia’s Daily Telegraph, Australian Medical Association NSW president Dr Brad Frankum said that cannabis is the most commonly abused illegal drug in Australia.

“A lot of people think cannabis is pretty harmless but we’ve known for some time of the links between cannabis and mental health and also its risks to lung health,” Dr Frankum said.

“This study proved what we suspected — that is also a risk factor for other drugs.

“It is rare to see a user of harder drugs like amphetamines or heroin who hasn’t used cannabis.”

The study reported that teenagers were more likely to smoke cannabis if they were male, their mothers had abused drugs, they smoked cigarettes as a child, drank alcohol and had behavioural problems.