re: New documents reveal why the FDA says marijuana isn't medicine

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Marijuana is addictive to monkeys.

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another reason I thank God I'm not a monkey.

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There is an almost infinite number of reasons why weed and hemp are better than cigarettes, alcohol, prescription opioids, prescription anxiety medication, prescription appetite stimulants

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Also, all of the non medical related applications of hemp.

You know, like the fact that it's more sustainable, longer lasting easier to grow, stronger, more economical, greener, and better in almost every single way to traditional timber farming.

It makes stronger boards, storage ropes, stronger fabrics, biodegradable plastics.

The list goes on and on

smoke weed til you die.

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Do they then claim that it's definitely not a gateway to other illicit drugs?

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This issue (non) is a red herring, especially from a medical standpoint.

From a basic "actual cause"standpoint, food and water are gateway substances, because without them you'd never try marijuana.

So let's dig deeper (into actual causation and weed as an alleged intervening cause) and then go to a proximate cause type analysis.

If you take people in a lab (forget question-begging drug-dealer arguments) and give them marijuana, is there anything in that substance that would lead them to want the next harder drug (like alcohol, which is already legal so oops)?

You'd have to isolate the subject's propensity to just try everything or at least the next thing, independent of the first thing given to him or her. In other words, you have to show something more than chronology.

You have to show something about marijuana itself that opens the gate.

Also, people who are willing to try weed are obviously more likely than people who are not, to try the next drug.

But this shows us absolutely nothing about marijuana as a gateway drug. Whatever is usually first will be the first thing these people try. So what?

More thoughts:
As i suggested, the only reason a drug dealer is going to have weed is because of the black market. Do heroin and meth dealers go around hocking 40s of OE and bottles of Mad Dog? I'd say not as a rule.

Anyway, "gateway" implies causation, and proximate (or something akin to that) causation, or else it is a meaningless term (hint, it is).

Eta: This was off the cuff, stream of consciousness phone typing. I'll try to refine later.

Long but interesting

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find it very hard to believe that nearly half of the US has tried weed

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That's funny. I find it hard to believe that only half of adults have tried weed. I bet that under 40, and that number is much higher

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Also, all of the non medical related applications of hemp.

You know, like the fact that it's more sustainable, longer lasting easier to grow, stronger, more economical, greener, and better in almost every single way to traditional timber farming.

It makes stronger boards, storage ropes, stronger fabrics, biodegradable plastics.

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Not sure about the board thing but it is one of the best natural plant fibers available. The outlawing of hemp produced for fiber use was just an opportunistic endeavor by the producers of abacá fiber AKA manila hemp (not actually a hemp plant at all). It is my understanding that the variant of hemp used to produce the fibers used commercially contains very little THC and is virtually unusable to produce a smokeable product, though I am not 100% on that.

I've known more people who've ruined their lives over weed addiction than any other drug or substances.

i don't know about "ruled out" but I know no one is going to do the studies that would be required to prove/disprove that, for some of the reasons i mentioned.

The article does say:

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It’s not a “gateway drug.” Discussing the so-called “gateway effect” that supposedly leads pot smokers to try more dangerous drugs, the FDA stated that research does not support a “direct causal relationship between regular marijuana use and other illicit drug use.”

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