“Do you believe that marijuana is a gateway drug?” This question is, by far, the most common question I’m asked by the older generation who is still unsure of what to believe when it comes to cannabis. My answer is simple, but first I’m going to dive into the details of why I believe this answer is correct.

The gateway to harder drugs is not through marijuana itself but through the criminalization of it.

This may sound crazy at first, but if you’ll suspend your disbelief and listen to the reasons, I think you’re going to see that this is actually a substantiated claim.

First off, I would like to explain my own personal experience with cannabis and other drugs to gain a foundation for what I believe to be true. I started smoking marijuana at nineteen-years-old. It was the summer after my freshman year of college, a year during which I’d struggled the entire time with debilitating anxiety and self-doubt. There were times when all I could think about was ending my life. I’m not going to lie: when I tried cannabis, I definitely wasn’t thinking of it as a “medicinal plant”—my friends told me it was awesome, and I just wanted to see what it was like. I had no idea how much it would help me with my anxiety and self-esteem. I loved it from the first time I tried it.

I ended up tearing my labrum that summer and needed to have it surgically repaired. At the time I knew nothing about prescription pain pills other than my mother had always been very against medication. She kept the narcotic pain medication away from me; I think I may have taken a couple right after surgery, but as soon as I got well enough to be around my friends again, I just smoked weed instead. Since I couldn’t work my job at Starbucks while my shoulder healed, I had this brilliant idea that I would sell a little pot. I was getting ounces of brick weed for 80 bucks and maybe making 50 bucks and smoking for free. Once I got healed up, I kept selling a little weed along with working two jobs.

About a year and a half after the first time I smoked weed, I got pulled over with a pound of mid-grade weed in my car. I had just paid a thousand dollars for it which, looking back, is pretty funny. At this point in my life, I had only ever smoked weed, drank alcohol, and done mushrooms. I had never even thought of trying harder drugs. I met with a lawyer, and he told me the best thing I could do was enter a drug class to look good for court. This drug class had random drug tests, and I had to attend class every Tuesday evening. I quickly learned that I could drink all the alcohol I wanted as long as I didn’t drink the day of the class. While being intoxicated from drinking more than I ever had, someone told me I could use Percocet and Vicodin to get me high on the weekends, but they would be out of my system by Tuesday. I knew you weren’t supposed to take pills that weren’t prescribed to you, but I thought it couldn’t be that big of a deal if they were made in a lab. It’s medicine, right? It’s supposed to help you.

Before long I couldn’t keep my use to the weekends; I needed more and more. Prescription opiates are synthetic heroin. If you are addicted to prescription opiates and can’t find any, you can go snort heroin and it will have the exact same effect. At my worst I was doing 240 mg of Oxycontin a day, a drug the FDA originally allowed Purdue Pharma to market as a non-addictive alternative to other opiates. I firmly believe that I would never have gotten addicted to opiates if I hadn’t been forced to stop smoking weed because of drug tests. I wouldn’t have had to get drug tested if I hadn’t gotten arrested for having marijuana. Marijuana gave me no desire to try opiates whatsoever. The same people who got me to try pills once I got arrested were doing them when I was smoking weed, but trying pills never even crossed my mind before the arrest.

So the first drug I ever tried was marijuana, and eventually I moved on to harder drugs. Without really looking at the totality of my situation, it appears that I am a supporting statistic to the gateway drug theory, but a closer analysis reveals that this is simply not the case. I think that a lot of people get into trouble or need to get a job that drug tests, and the first thing people do is tell you all the things you can do instead. Drug tests in themselves are incredibly unfair to cannabis users. Because of the half-life of THC stored in fat cells, you can test positive for marijuana a month or more after use. This basically means that the only drug you can’t use is the least harmful one.

Another reason that points to marijuana prohibition as the true cause of the gateway epidemic: K2. The first time I was ever exposed to “K2,” also known as “spice,” was on a trip with friends to a bunch of Six Flags amusement parks on the east coast. At the time, I was completely clean and sober after my battle with opiate addiction. We had taken my car, and though both of the guys with me smoked pot and the people we were staying with up the coast smoked as well, I hadn’t allowed them to bring any with them on the road. On the drive between New Jersey and Rhode Island, they decided they wanted to smoke. They’d heard about some kind of “synthetic weed” that was sold in head shops. We found one online and drove there to check it out. Even though it was legal, I didn’t feel comfortable doing it with my sobriety. They rolled up a blunt fully anticipating a weed-like experience. I didn’t smoke it, but I saw their reactions, and it certainly didn’t look like weed to me. They both hated it and threw the rest away. It clearly was nothing at all like weed.

A couple of years later I came into contact with K2 again when my roommate at the time started smoking it. His sister was a nurse and needed to pass a drug test, so they switched over from weed to K2 together. I have never seen anything more horrifying and nauseating. He would get up at six in the morning to go to the head shop that didn’t open until seven. There would be a line wrapped around the building of people waiting to buy it. I have seen people on prescription pills, heroin, meth, and cocaine, but I have never in my life seen anything as bad as their addiction. I would get home from work and he would be sitting on the couch, bowl in hand, drool dripping down the side of his mouth. His eyes would be wide open, but nothing would be behind them. Mouth agape, he’d have this completely blank stare, devoid of all life. I would clap in his face and he would come back to reality only to immediately hit the bowl again. Straight back into zombie-mode he’d descend. I remember being shocked. Utter disbelief that this spice-chasing zombie had replaced the person I’d thought was my roommate.

Even now, in prison, the story is the same. I lost my two best friends here to K2. We were doing everything right: working out, playing sports, doing yoga every day. They were the best musicians I have ever been around, good enough to really make careers out of their talent. We thought we were buying pre-rolled joints of weed, but after a few hits each, we all knew it wasn’t. I had never felt so crazy, like no other drug I’ve ever experienced, but once my two friends got on it, they just couldn’t stop. Every time they were high they would talk about how it was the last time they were doing it, but thirty minutes later they would be back smoking more. There was a crew of guys, maybe seven of them, that would walk around the unit like zombies.

Everyone in the prison system knows about K2, and people overdose and die on it regularly. The reason people do it is because it doesn’t show up on a drug test. Unlike synthetic heroin, which are prescription pills made by pharmaceutical companies and approved by the FDA, “synthetic marijuana” or “K2” is literally chemicals from China sprayed on either herbs or just paper. The reason it stays legal is because as the DEA chases the manufacturing and distribution of it, the manufacturers keep changing the chemical compounds as different ones get made illegal. It’s a game of cat and mouse that ends with a bunch of people addicted to chemicals similar to rat poison. The only reason it’s called “synthetic marijuana” is to get people to smoke it. If you called it “rat poison from China,” how many people do you think would be lining up around the block for a hit?

Here’s an excerpt from the official website of the governor of the state of Nebraska:

“We are already witnessing the effects of an informal medical experiment play out here in our state. In recent years, the use of K2, a synthetic form of marijuana has spread in Nebraska and the consequences of its use have been incredibly dire in spite of legislatures efforts to ban its use. Since April 12th, K2 has resulted in over 100 overdoses in just the Lincoln area alone. This is just a reminder of how dangerous Marijuana can be and why any medicinal use needs FDA oversight.“

I cannot really express how infuriating that paragraph is after witnessing first hand the effects of K2 on people. The only reason people try it is because marijuana is illegal. Flat out zero people on earth would smoke K2 if marijuana was legal, and K2’s chemical properties, side effects, and addiction rate have nothing in common with marijuana. The term “synthetic marijuana” implies that it is a drug made by professionals to mimic the effects of marijuana, which K2 is not. The governor of the state of Nebraska has to use overdose statistics of a completely different drug to come up with any reason to say no to medical marijuana, which is no different than saying caffeine should be illegal because tobacco is bad for you. So once again, you can see how marijuana being illegal is actually the gateway to the K2 epidemic.

Now, here is where I can agree to some extent in the gateway drug theory. Because marijuana has been illegal, when someone makes the decision that the law is not going to stop them from doing what they want, it can become a slippery slope to someone with an addiction problem: if I am willing to break the law to smoke weed, I am not going to care about breaking the law to shoot heroin. While I do think that logic like this exists, I think the solution of simply legalizing marijuana takes that out of play. Now adults can make decisions to smoke or not smoke marijuana based on their own reactions to it. They haven’t already committed a crime by trying marijuana. I think we see this playing out in legal states where opiate overdose deaths are decreasing drastically. Also, when you tell people that marijuana is just as bad as heroin and they try marijuana. They realize that cannabis isn’t this evil drug that ruins your life. If we lie to young people about the effects of marijuana, why would they believe that other drugs are that bad? We need to educate young people about the dangers of using any drug too early, but not lie to them by acting like marijuana and heroin are the same. People are going to do drugs, period. We need to educate them on the real effects of each, instead of broadly saying they are all bad don’t do any of them.

So, to sum up my answer to the great gateway drug question. I think the gateway drug to heroin is prescription opiates. I think the gateway drug to cocaine is alcohol. I think the gateway drug to meth is cocaine and Adderall. I think that cannabis is the solution to this epidemic, not the cause. I think taking away drug-testing for marijuana would completely end the K2 market while lowering the amount of alcohol abuse and other drug use, and this is coming from someone who has been deeply involved in the marijuana industry, served drinks to raging alcoholics as a bartender, and been personally addicted to opiates.

I know how the world of drugs and alcohol really works, and marijuana is not a gateway drug.