Reply #93: I used to have a pamphlet that talked about the actual percentage

[IdaBriggs]

of teens who used pot as a "gateway" drug -- its not at my fingertips at the moment. Anyway, one of the things it specifically broached was the AGE when someone used it 'for the first time' -- the younger the first time user, the increased risk of it being a 'gateway' drug.

So, for example, if you use 'magic weed' for the first time in college while going through that dangerous experimental time, you have a better chance of not getting your life ruined than you do if you are a fourteen year old. For that fourteen year old, this 'risky' behavior and its resultant 'feel good high' becomes something to pursue (since they don't have the maturity that even an eighteen year old does, unfortunately), and that is when things get UGLY -- but not for everybody, thank goodness.

While the vast majority of folks (I think the study said 80%, but that is from memory) don't end up in 'disaster' situations with 'harder' drugs and alcohol, those 20% who do usually end up falling hard (and my family has several examples of them) with all of the characteristics of 'bad things happening to good people' stuff.

Hence my "russian roulette" analogy. If it only gets ugly for one out of five people, should the rest of society be concerned? My answer is yes; you might have a different one.

Then again, I will bluntly state that my perception is very much affected by the family tragedies I have experienced thanks to the use of (illegal) recreational drugs. I will wonder for the rest of my life, if my sister had bothered to get her white blood cell level checked, and known that her use of marijuana was responsible for lowering it, would she still be alive?

She was 39, and I will never know the answer to that question. Then again, since she was providing illegal drugs to minors (her then sixteen year old daughter, and her daughter's boyfriend, also sixteen THE DAY AFTER HE GOT OUT OF A DRUG REHAB PROGRAM), and their lives have pretty much been destroyed (heroin addiction / jail), maybe we are all better off with her dead, and unable to spread the poison to other people's children.

What a terrible, terrible thought her decisions have left me with! :cry: