The Rise of Marijuana as the Drug of Choice Among Youthful Adult Arrestees

Various surveys have identified a rapid increase in marijuana use during the 1990s, especially among youths. This raises a variety of questions about the future of the Nation’s drug problems. On one hand, the gateway theory posits that youthful use of alcohol and/or tobacco and marijuana tends to precede use of other illicit drugs like crack and heroin (see “The Gateway Theory”). The recent increase in youthful marijuana use has fueled speculation that a new epidemic of hard drug abuse may be imminent and that the burden of drug abuse will be dramatically increasing in the near future. On the other hand, the start of this new epidemic coincides with the decline of the crack epidemic. This suggests that youthful subcultures may have shifted from the destructive nature of crack abuse to the use of less dangerous drugs.