GATEWAYS?

Thirty years ago Columbia University's Denise Kandel began tracking a
number of New York high-school students, compiling stats of drug use. In
studies released since 1975, Mrs. Kandel has maintained legal-drug use
(alcohol, nicotine) leads to illicit-drug use (marijuana, cocaine, etc.).
The science community and sociologists (and the National Institute on Drug
Abuse), for the most part, have accepted her conclusions. What's more, for
years those wishing to ban tobacco and alcohol consumption have trotted out
the so-called gateway theory.

Bulletin: The World Health Organization recently released a new study
comparing drug use of 95,000 European 10th-graders and 14,000 American
10th-graders. The findings include the following:

37 percent of European teens had smoked a cigarette within the past month;
26 percent of the American teen-agers had.

61 percent of the Europeans used alchohol within the past month; 40 percent
of the Americans did.

17 percent of the Europeans and 41 percent of the Americans had tried
marijuana. And,

6 percent and 23 percent of European and American 10th-graders,
respectively, had experimented with other illicit drugs.

So, the conventional wisdom of researchers and pols is that alcohol and
tobacco serve as a gateway to pot, which in turn serves as a gateway to
"harder" drugs such as speed, acid, and blow. Yet if alcohol and tobacco
use among European teen-agers is more prevalent than that among American
youth, then why are U.S. teens 21/2 times more likely to smoke marijuana
and nearly four times more likely than their Euro counterparts to snort
coke or shoot heroin? Does the gateway theorists' contention hold water?