Please Help Me With My Gateway Drug Math 101 Homework

Abacus and Soroban

Even if racial profiling, pharma loving, reefer madness politicians want to ignore the countless scientific studies rolling out debunking the marijuana gateway theory, we can all perform a basic sniff test without having a PhD.  Can we all agree to applying some basic math and common sense looking at the United States population?

Numerator: 2.4M Americans addicted to heroin or cocaine (aka ‘hard drugs’)

• Heroin addicts: 0.9M
• Cocaine regular users: 1.5M
• Lets be generous and assume a person can only be addicted to one of the two drugs, 2.4M

Denominator: 104M Americans have tried marijuana

Answer: 2.3% (2.4 / 104)  If every single hard drug addict smoked marijuana before trying a hard drug, it would still only be 2.3% of the marijuana population in the US.  The ‘gateway effect’ of marijuana is unimpressive at best.

Class Dismissed?