A UF study has found evidence that alcohol is the primary gateway drug that can result in use of more dangerous substances.
Alcohol can be the first step toward substance use, said Adam Barry, an assistant professor and researcher in the College of Health and Human Performance.
“By preventing alcohol initiation, we can prevent initiation into other substances,” he said.
The UF study was based on data from a separate 2008 Monitoring the Future study. Information collected from 14,577 U.S. high school seniors was used to determine if they had used any of 11 regulated and illicit drugs.
Barry said UF researchers made the correlation between alcohol and other drug use by using a Guttman scale with survey respondents. For each of the 11 drugs the students had used, they were given one point on the 11-point scale.
The researchers were then able to predict what drugs each student had used based only on their score and how common use of each drug was.
“A student that scored three points would have probably used alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana,” Barry said. “We found that we were able to predict responses with about 92 percent accuracy.”
According to the Monitoring the Future study, more than 70 percent of the 12th-grade students surveyed reported consuming alcohol.
According to GatorWell Health Promotion Services’ Core Alcohol and Drug Survey from Fall 2011, 80.2 percent of the UF students surveyed consumed alcohol in the past year.
“There is usually an initial experimentation with more socially acceptable drugs,” Barry said. “You’re not going to go to a bar and see someone shooting up heroin.”
The study also found that students who drink can be 16 times more likely to use regulated and illicit substances.
Barry said the study’s findings could be used by parents and grade schools to prevent illicit substance use. He supports a zero-tolerance policy toward alcohol.
“The longer you can fend off alcohol use, the longer you can fend off the use of other substances,” he said.
