Gateways

Very early this morning, as I lay awake, flopping on the bed, trying to find the "cool side" of the pillow, the phrase "gateway drug" dropped into my head. I know essentially how it got there, since I had been up an hour previous that that, getting a pair of Advil to calm my screeching joints. I wouldn't have been up for the Ibuprofin if I hadn't had the two souvenir cups of Pepsi the previous evening while watching the Oakland A's defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers. No Pepsi, no Advil - No baseball, no Pepsi - an ugly string of contamination.
As I lay there, I started pondering other "gateway" experiences. Peanut butter obviously opens the door not just for grape jelly, but celery as well - and the real hard cases end up hooked on Thai food. French fries will send you down the long and scary road of curly fries, garlic fries, Cajun fries, potato planks and, I shudder to think of it, shoestring potatoes. Comic books lead directly to graphic novels, digital cable leads to high definition TV, and having a garage will most certainly lead you to the path of power tools.
The "gateway" theory has been used for years to encourage the prohibition of marijuana - as it has been linked by "experts" as a psychological stepping stone to injecting heroin and snorting lines of laundry detergent. It seems to me that finding a scary enough connection between undesirable habits and behavior that is even worse. A good example of this was the whole cell phone/brain cancer thing a while back. If people really thought they could get cancer from talking on their cell phones, maybe they really would turn them off at the beginning of movies, or in meetings, or ever. Talking on cell phones deteriorates the valuable communication lines between the public and private sectors. In the event of an emergency, all available circuits must be available for important news and information. Without this link, chaos will ensue, and society will collapse. Cell phones are the gateway to Armageddon.