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This study examines young people's first use of various types of illicit drugs and their experience of first-time offending, including truancy. It aims to investigate the gateway effect - the hypothesis that the use of soft drugs leads to a higher, future risk of hard drug use and crime.

Title: The road to ruin? Sequences of initiation into drug use and offending by young people in Britain - Home Office Research Study 253
Author: Stephen Pudney
Number of pages: 44
Date published: December 2002

The study uses information from the 1998/99 Youth Lifestyles Survey (YLS), which contains information taken from over 3,900 interviews with young people on their own experiences of drug use and offending.

On the surface the YLS data appears largely consistent with some variants of the gateway theory, in that the age for use of soft drugs is less than the age of onset for most hard drugs. However, analysis of the data suggests that gateway effects are probably too small to be a major factor in the design of effective anti-drug policy. Other approaches, such as education, treatment and various types of local initiative, are more likely to be effective than a general campaign against soft drugs.

The report finds:

• No significant impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement with crack and heroin.

• Very little impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement in crime.

• A significant but small gateway effect probably exists linking soft drug use to the social drugs ecstasy and cocaine. However, after correcting for the likely effect of underlying unobservable factors, the predicted long-run consequence of even a complete removal of soft drugs from the scene would only be a one-third cut in the prevalence of ecstasy and cocaine.

Home Office Research Study 253 - The road to ruin? Sequences of initiation into drug use and offending by young people in Britain PDF 164 Kb