Summary

Payton Green

Psychology

Summary

Dr. Kandel and her colleagues did an excellent job of presenting what science has to offer on this subject. Albeit the verdict is still out on whether or not the Gateway Hypothesis represents a true causal progression, one point is certain. There is nothing inevitable about drug progression from alcohol and/or nicotine to drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

This notion of foreordainment engenders a quandary in the way the Gateway Hypothesis has been utilized in policy formation. There is a connotation associated with this concept that the pristine researchers who coined the phrase probably never intended. Most of the world has interpreted the pattern or sequence of drug utilize as a pathway, whereas at best it is more homogeneous to a funnel. According to this metaphor, everyone who has ever endeavored or used drugs is at the sizably voluminous cessation of the funnel, and, albeit events may foster more drug use for some individuals, there remains only a minuscule subset of users who genuinely go on to become addicts at the other terminus of the funnel. Why is this? I believe a key part of the answer to questions about drug use patterns and deportments lies in incrementing our understanding of the neurobiological substructure of addiction, categorically the encephalon mechanisms involved in the transition to addiction and of how the encephalon is sensitized to or cross-sensitized by various drugs.

Over the past decades our construal of drug abuse has grown tremendously, including our cognizance of both the neurobiology of addiction and the factors that increase the jeopardy that an individual will initiate drug use or will escalate to a caliber of drug addiction or a substance

abuse disorder. Studies dating back to the 1970s suggest that adolescents tend to use alcohol and/or tobacco before marijuana, and marijuana and alcohol before other illicit drugs, such as cocaine and/or heroin. In the 1980s, the term Gateway drug was...