Beyond Nicotine Gateway Hypothesis

“A gateway drug is a drug that lowers the threshold for addiction to other agents†[1]. Psychological studies involving humans suggested that addiction is a form of learning and that relapse is a persistent memory of the drug experiences [2]. It is the gene transcription factor cyclic AMP response-element-binding protein (CREB) acting as a switch, converting short-term memory to long-term memory, referred to as the acetylation of chromatin structures [3]. For nicotine gateway hypothesis, data from a group of students, aged 15.7 to 34.2 years, showing the majority of cocaine users (75.2%) were smoking during the month they began using cocaine [4], and the rate of cocaine dependence was highest (20.2%) among users who started using cocaine after having smoked cigarettes, in contrast to dependence among persons who had begun using cocaine before they started smoking (6.3%) and among those who had never smoked more than 100 cigarettes (10.1%) [5].