More likely just a case of poor decision making as opposed to withdrawl symptoms.
Ah, decisions, decisions. Stay out of a high-speed accident? Or find that lighter and stop the withdrawl symptoms?
Most users of pot have their first exposure/use of the drug before their 18th birthday (NIJ). This would tend to discount the idea of "most" pot smokers using a bar as a local to obtain their first hit. I'll agree that a person's "friends" are most likely to be their first source for using pot.
Maybe I should have been more clear. I wasn't suggesting alcohol, by way of bars, leads to the first use of pot. I was suggesting that attending a bar, ostensibly for the consumption of alcolhol, exposes one to great availability of harder drugs and is thereby a gateway.
For example, in its heyday, I suspect that if you went to Studio 54, again, ostensibly for alcohol because it was a licensed bar, you didn't have to bring your own cocaine if that's what you really wanted.
I'd be curious about the % of alcohol users who go on to use hard drugs once or twice, or even the % of hard drug users who have used alcohol (bet it's 99.999%).
While I realize this little bit is anecdotal, I once knew (and got as far away from as fast as I could) a fellow who, when he wanted to tell all his family he had quit drinking, would use cocaine instead. When he got in trouble (because he is a mean drunk AND a mean coke user), he'd go right back to drinking. Wouldn't touch pot with a ten foot pole, and it wasn't because he disagreed with the concept of inhaling smoke being good for you (2 pack-a-day habit whether he was drinking or using coke).
What leads to what else is hype.
What is more dangerous is hype.
But the statisics describing causes of death aren't hype. You have to read quite a few lines down before you get to the first illegal drug, probably heroin. But you don't have to read very far down to find tobacco, and not much further to find alcohol.
Does this mean I'm itching to get my hands on some heroin? Not really, I don't have the time.
It does seem to indicate that the punishments for using the various substances or for selling them appears to be out of whack when held up against the damage done by them. Which means that the punishments must have some OTHER motivation behind them (rather than to save lives).
What might that motivation be? When I see something that doesn't fit right in the social world (as opposed to the scientific world) I try to follow the money to get to the bottom of why it doesn't fit. What could be more profitable than the ability to trump up charges against a very large class of people and confiscate their property leaving them little recourse?
What Rich seems to see and that I certainly see is that, even if you don't use drugs or want them, the result is a gradual erosion of constitutional rights in order to accomplish the objective stated above. The loss of rights makes it easier to lose rights in other areas, until finally it's happening in an area near you.
A claim that the constitution doesn't contain any right to use drugs misses the point. The constitution DOES contain the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When rapists and attempted murderers are turned out of prison in 3-8 years to make room to replace them with merchants for minimum mandatory 10 or 20 years, you are being deprived of these three rights. You and I are being unjustly exposed to proven violent criminals for reasons based on nothing but hype.
It doesn't have anything to do with a "right to use drugs". It has to do with those 3 basic rights and the proper use of available facilities to try to ensure you of them, and the abuse of these facilities for something stupid.
