Todtkopf. People who smoke both marijuana and crack generally start smoking marijuana some months before they start on crack. So marijuana is a threshold drug that leads people to later take on more dangerous substances!
Revanchi. But your only evidence that marijuana is a threshold drug is that people who smoke both generally start smoking marijuana some time before they start on crack. But everyone who smokes crack previously drank milk, so if marijuana has a threshold effect, then so does milk!
If this is the only evidence we have, we should conclude that marijuana is not a threshold drug. Apparently, a "threshold" substance is a substance that somehow, by itself, causes its users to go out and become a user of some more dangerous substance. In this case, it is alleged that marijuana is a threshold substance for crack cocaine. If this is true, then a significant number of present crack cocaine users would not presently be crack users if they had not previously been users of marijuana. On this view, if marijuana had been unavailable, these people would not now be crack users. On the other hand, if marijuana is not a threshold drug, then these crackheads would have found their way to crack whether or not marijuana had been available. It's important to note that the only evidence offered here is that those users who do both generally do marijuana before they do crack. This argument will only work if it is a universal rule that doing one thing before you do another thing proves that doing the first thing caused you to do the second thing. If this is a rule, then the fact that those crackheads who also drink milk started drinking milk sometime before they started doing crack proves that milk is a threshold substance for crack. This is nonsense, and so the rule is false, and therefore Todkopf's argument fails.
Another
good critique would be:
Based on this, marijuana does not have a threshold effect. This is because the side that thinks marijuana is a threshold drug bears the burden of proof and, at least as far as this dialogue is concerned, has not met that burden. This is because the only evidence offered is the fact that people who use both drugs usually use marijuana before they move on to crack. Marijuana would only have a threshold effect if it could be shown that using marijuana, by itself, caused people to become crack users. Todtkopf's argument only works if the fact that one substance is used before another substance always means that the first substance has a threshold effect regarding the second substance. Since people who have used both crack and milk invariably used milk before they used crack, that rule would mean that milk has a threshold effect regarding crack. This is absurd, so the rule is absurd, and Todtkopf's argument fails.
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