Gateway drugs

I commented earlier on the apparent redefinition of "gateway drug" to mean "drug whose use is correlated with the use of other drugs" instead of "drug whose use leads to the use of harder, more dangerous drugs."  Well, with regards to the first, I saw this article today, and in one paragraph, this is noted:


And a 2017 Washington University study found that 33.3 percent of heroin addicts entering rehab in 2015 initiated nonmedical drug use with heroin, as opposed to 8.7 percent in 2005.


Now chew on that a little; regarding the overall hypothesis of the gateway drug, one would expect first of all that it would be difficult to figure out what was "people who use drug A are more likely to use drug B to begin with", and which was a true "gateway" drug.  But even more significantly, we are finding that for a very significant portion of heroin users, there was no other illegal drug involved before they started using what is, apart from fentanyl, one of the most dangerous drugs out there.


In other words, we have the very difficult task of figuring out what the real motivation is for people to try these powerful painkillers, and that seems to lead to what should be a fairly obvious conclusion;  Maybe we should ask those who are using why they're doing something so dangerous, and ask ourselves whether we can meet their needs with something less lethal.