(MintPress) – It’s often a classic representation of marijuana when you’re first told about it: It’s the dreaded “gateway drug.” In other words, once you have used marijuana, you will inexplicably want cocaine.

While that’s hardly ever been the case, a recent study conducted by researchers at Yale University found that while one-third of marijuana users likely would abuse prescription opiates, the true “gateway drug” seemed to be alcohol, with 57 percent acknowledging prescription opiate use. Researchers acknowledge that any form of substance abuse makes people twice as likely to abuse prescription opiates, but it is alcohol that is often widely accepted in society while marijuana receives both political and societal vilification.

Adam Barry, the study’s co-author, said schools wrongly focus on marijuana as a gateway to other drugs while educating adolescents about drug abuse and often neglect alcohol as a worse contributor because of its ubiquitous presence in America.

“Some of these earlier iterations needed to be fleshed out,” Barry said. “That’s why we wanted to study this. The latest form of the gateway theory is that it begins with [marijuana] and moves on finally to what laypeople often call ‘harder drugs.’ As you can see from the findings of our study, it confirmed this gateway hypothesis, but it follows progression from licit substances, specifically alcohol, and moves on to illicit substances.”

Obama vs. states’ rights

Since President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, marijuana legalization and the crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries have critics calling out the president for going back on one of his campaign promises. During stump speeches in 2007, Obama said he would support medical marijuana outlets if doctors said it helped patients, saying its pain relief benefits make it no different than other prescription pain relievers.

“My attitude is if the science and the doctors suggest that the best palliative care and the way to relieve pain and suffering is medical marijuana then that’s something I’m open to because there’s no difference between that and morphine when it comes to just giving people relief from pain,” Obama said during a 2007 town hall meeting in Iowa. “But I want to do it under strict guidelines. I want it prescribed in the same way that other painkillers or palliative drugs are prescribed.”

But since 2009, the Obama administration and the Justice Department have been behind more than 170 medical marijuana raids in nine states. More than 100 of those raids have occurred in California, where state laws allow for legal medical marijuana sales at licensed dispensaries. Reports suggest that many of those raids were at outlets that were complying with state law and had no history of illegal activity.

But the president says he has not gone back on his campaign promises and is only enforcing federal laws. In an interview with Rolling Stone in April, the president noted that he asked the Justice Department to simply prioritize what it thought to be most important with the distribution of marijuana.

“What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana,” Obama said. “I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law.”

In the process of enforcing federal laws, Obama has angered states that have implemented their own laws to regulate marijuana transactions. Political leaders from California, Colorado, Maine, New Mexico and Washington wrote a collective letter earlier in the year to denounce Obama’s approval of dispensary crackdowns.

The lawmakers also said Obama is wasting law enforcement resources by focusing on a drug that has little to no threat at all to the nation. They also said that continued raids would only force patients in need of medicinal marijuana to look within the underground market and purchase it illegally.

“We call on President Obama to recommit to the principles and policy on which he campaigned and asserted his first year in office,” the letter said. “Please respect our state laws. And don’t use our employees as pawns in your zealous and misguided war on medical marijuana.”

Inner-party turmoil

The raids have prompted members within Obama’s own party to be highly critical of his policy, with Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank calling the crackdowns a “grave mistake.” Both Frank and Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, have said they feel Obama has gone back on his campaign word and is alienating the Democratic Party by continuing domestic closures of medical marijuana dispensaries.

That may be happening to an extent already in California, where the local Democratic Party in San Francisco denounced the Obama administration’s actions of “aggressively persecuting a peaceful and regulated community, wasting federal resources in using a series of threatening tactics to shut down regulated access to medical cannabis across the state of California.”

Frank said small business owners are ultimately the ones affected by the anti-marijuana policies when their shops are closed and that it can hurt Obama’s re-election chances seeing as 50 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana use, according to a Gallup poll.

“It’s unfair and will hurt innocent people,” Frank said. “I think it’s bad politics and bad policy. I’m very disappointed.”

Obama has also expanded his pushback against marijuana and other controlled substances beyond states in the Southwest to areas of Mexico that push marijuana to the borders of countries such as Columbia and its cocaine and heroin trafficking. The dubbed “War on Drugs” has become America’s longest conflict, resulting in taxpayer burdens. Figures also suggest that billions of dollars have been spent over the last four decades in border conflicts, resulting in tens of thousands of lives lost.

New York Times economic reporter Eduardo Porter says the war will continue with no end in sight as long as demand in the U.S. remains strong, which is currently the case. Obama is stubbornly fighting a drug trend that is currently seeing the price of cocaine 74 percent cheaper than is was 30 years ago, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Instead of looking to eradicate the drug, Porter suggests Obama look to nullify its demand among Americans by reinvesting in public health.

“Most important, conceived to eradicate the illegal drug market, the war on drugs cannot be won,” Porter opined. “Once they understand this, the Mexican and American governments may consider refocusing their strategies to take aim at what really matters: the health and security of their citizens, communities and nations.”