Automatic Monkey said:
It's a deceptively dangerous drug. Marijuana + paranoid schizophrenic = homicide.
HC could be considered a gateway to cheating because of the way you can get treated by the casino as a result of getting caught. Sort of like the way pot can make you a criminal- you might have never done anything illegal before that but a stint in jail and you learn about sodomy, violence, burglary, fraud, etc. from your jailmates. If I am HC I am prepared for all kinds of nasty consequences that don't come with counting, so I almost have to prepare for a HC caper as though I was a criminal.
However, marijuana is not referred to as the "gateway drug" for the reasons you mentioned, even if those reasons are valid, but for the fact that it introduces a person to the practice of taking chemicals into their bodies for the sake of an effect on the nervous system (for want of a better way to describe it). This, it is believed by some, will lead them to experiment with other more potent and more dangerous chemical substances, and will also put them in proximity with people who do use other drugs. The gateway idea is probably true for the weak minded in a sense, but I don't think it is necessarily a valid generalization. Marijuana does not lead medically speaking to taking other drugs, no more than alcohol does, and many people never take drugs beyond marijuana. Even if it could be shown that marijuana users usually experiment with other drugs, which it probably can't, there would still be no causal relationship to taking other drugs to my mind. Marijuana from what I see is just another drug, milder than most, and arguably, not a dangerous one, although I think the jury is still out on that. It probably affects different people different ways. You said marijuana plus paranoid schizophrenia was bad; I suppose paranoid schizophrenia and nearly any drug, including alcohol, is probably dangerous, but I have never studied it, and I don't know. I suspect that two brothers of mine actually became paranoid schizophrenics from the use of marijuana, not the other way around, but I have no way of proving that. I do know that schizophrenia and Lupus are mutually exclusive diseases, and I do have three brothers, two of them diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics and one diagnosed as having Lupus, and all three were heavy marijuana users. How certain substances may trigger the advent of different diseases is not a clearly understood matter, but I do believe marijuana has been linked with affecting the auto-immune system.