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UK: A hard case to prove
Ivor Gaber The Guardian
Wednesday 15 Jan 2003 Ivor Gaber on the 'gateway' effect of soft drugs Later this year, cannabis will move from being a class B drug to class C. Those who opposed, and still oppose, this move claim that while cannabis in itself may be relatively harmless, it acts as a vital link in the progression from soft to hard drugs - the so-called "gateway hypothesis". It is also argued that there is a close link between drug use and other criminal behaviour. But are these suppositions true? As with almost all research into human behaviour, we can never know for sure. We cannot stick human beings in a laboratory, isolate them from all other experiences and observe the effects. The next best thing is to look at reliable statistical evidence that uses big numbers and produces robust data - and that is what economist Steven Pudney, of the University of Leicester, has done on behalf of the Home Office. Pudney looked at results from a sample of almost 4,000 young people - aged 12-30 - who, as part of the government's youth lifestyles survey, recounted confidentially their experiences of drug use and offending. This data showed that the age when most young people started taking soft drugs was lower than the age of onset for most hard drugs; for example, the average ages of first use of glue/solvents and cannabis were 14.1 and 16.6 years respectively, compared with 17.5 and 20.2 for heroin and cocaine. This appeared to support the gateway hypothesis. There was less apparent evidence of a gateway effect from drug use into crime. The average ages of onset for truancy and crime were 13.8 and 14.5 respectively, compared with 16.2 for drugs generally and 19.9 for hard drugs. Thus, criminal behaviour tended to precede drug use, rather than vice versa. However, Pudney challenges both these conclusions. Soft drugs and minor crime offer the easiest avenues for the very young to offend, he argues, but opportunity widens with age. Early soft drug use and later hard drug use may be joint expressions of the same underlying personal problem: apparent progression from one to the other may simply be a consequence of the fact that soft drugs are easier to get and more affordable for younger teenagers than hard drugs. Pudney goes on to use statistical techniques to attempt to isolate the role of unobservable factors, such as a social or psychological predisposition towards anti-social behaviour, thus solving this problem of "spurious association". Having done so, he reports very little remaining evidence of any causal gateway effect. While it might be that most hard drug addicts do start off as soft drug users, he says it cannot be concluded from this that hard drug use is caused by previous soft drugs experience. Pudney's conclusions are that there is no significant impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement with crack cocaine or heroin, and that there is very little impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement in crime. He says there is a small, but possibly significant, link between soft drug use and use of ecstasy and cocaine. However, even a theoretical complete absence of soft drugs would result only in a one-third cut in the prevalence of ecstasy and cocaine. "By linking soft and hard drugs under the same banner of illegality," Pudney warns, "a strict policy stance may have the perverse effect of amplifying the gateway effect and increasing the prevalence of hard drugs in the long run." More information at: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hors253.pdf
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