Since the 1970s, the US Government has sold the public a rather simple explanation for drug addiction, now clinically called substance abuse disorder: the myth of the gateway drug. The gateway drug — usually weed, alcohol, tobacco, or inhalants — refers to the theory that the earlier a child starts using drugs, the more likely they are to get into the harder stuff later in life, like heroin or cocaine. Though the idea was pioneered as early as the 1930s, the policy term was believed to be coined by the psychiatrist Robert DuPont, the first director of the US National […]