Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent.
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
This kind of reasoning is perfect. You remember when alcohol was made illegal in the US? Remember the harm that caused from gangs, uneven police crackdowns on illegal bars, and such rampant criminality that alcohol was quickly re-legalized? The drug war is 100x worse.
If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on.
Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.
> Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
The argument you are making here is not that drugs should be legalized for consistency's sake. The argument you are making is that drugs should be legalized because the dangers of prohibition outweigh the benefits. That is a completely different line of reasoning
If our threshold for badness is X and we apply that to alcohol, but don't apply that to drugs, then we're being inconsistent with how we apply our threshold for badness. You just had to take your argument a step further to see the consistency argument.
Consistency in how the law is applied is important, but not that the composite of all laws be absolutely fair relative to each other. That is "foolish consistency" because it's impossible except by very closed-minded fundamentalism. The idea that you find the "worst" thing that is legal and then repeal all laws against things which are "better" is not a viable legislative strategy.
There is nothing foolish about treating things that are the same consistently. It would be foolish to grant animals citizenships to keep it consistent with humans, but just as e.g. human rights are applied consistently to people no matter where they come from or how they look like so should our policies to things be in general. Alcohol is a drug with a tremendous potential for harm, and if a society decides it wants to ban those, again there is nothing foolish in doing that consistently. But when looked at like that, it's clear there is not much rational in the way we regulate things. It's just a bunch of traditions and whims.
I’m generally pro-legalization, but there are many things that we hypothesize are safe but do not know the long-term effects of and, within living memory, have discovered that many things initially thought safe were not.
People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc.
What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
I do agree with this argument, but most of the time legalising doesn't just make problems disappear. It needs to be paired with better access to mental health facilities, rehabilitiation, etc.
Making drugs legal doesn't mean people will start abusing them. I do not drink or take drugs, and both are easy as hell to access here in the UK.
The benefits for me of legalising drugs would be making it easier for people to seek help with less stigma attached to it, remove drug dealers out of the equation, make it safer to procur drugs if people are going to take them anyway, I believe it would also make scientific research much easier which in turn might help us to know the long term effects of these drugs.
Does legalization make things better or worse than now? If it makes things better but still not perfect, perhaps we don’t need to hold up legalization until we can provide better mental health facilities, rehab, better public transport so people can get to these facilities easier, etc.
I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future.
Wouldn't this in effect give a parent with multiple children multiple votes.
Mail in voting means you'd just fill out the ballots for your kids.
I think voting should remain at 18. Although I have some ideas on making more concerns local. Why does most of my tax dollars go to the federal government rather than the state.
At the State level at least I have a remote chance of being heard. And if I don't like what my state is doing, I can drive 50 miles to another.
> What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
Considering that we are talking about alcohol, this argument could just as well be used in favor of liberalization.
In that case the question becomes: has use (and in particular abuse) of substances increased after legalization? Which I will just throw out there since I’m too lazy to research it myself.
Legalization brings production and sale of recreational drugs under regulation. That will not stop all harms, but those harms are then more likely to be known. Addiction treatment is more accessible when drug use is not criminalized.
That is faulty logic. We hypothesize that mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are safe but do not know the long term effects. Why should we exercise conservatism for some drugs but not for vaccines?
To be clear, I'm just using that as an example of logical inconsistency and I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated. I also think that all recreational drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized) because regardless of the potential long-term effects the failed war on (some) drugs is causing far more harm than the drugs themselves.
For what it's worth, mRNA immunotherapies for cancer have been being injected into people for almost 20 years now. Efficacy aside, we know the medium-long term outcomes of injecting ourselves with mRNA.
The relative risk reduction for potentially catching covid-19 vs actually having cancer are radically different. Long to medium term risk of adverse effects from mRNA therapies are probably not weighed heavily against imminent eventuality of short term death with cancer. Edit- that's not to say I don't disagree with you on us knowing the long-medium term risks of mRNA therapies.
I'm not getting into the relative merits of vaccination, I'm merely saying that mRNA isn't going to hurt you. Even decades from now. We know there are no medium-term risks of mRNA therapies because the otherwise healthy people who have injected themselves with mRNA are still alive and kicking.
Here is the first Phase I test of an mRNA vaccine from 2013.
While that is technically correct, mRNA is something your body makes in relatively large quantities every day. As such if it was harmful life itself wouldn't be possible.
Really the argument should be about strengthening informed consent. "Safety" is not objective; something that one individual would consider safe might not be safe for another. For example I have friends that like to go sky-diving. For them it's "safe". For me, it's not. Drugs should require a waiver similar to signing up for a credit card. e.g.,
"This drug completed a 12 month Phase 2 clinical trial with 65,917 participants in which the drug demonstrated efficacy of Y against symptomatic disease. 1.5% of participants experienced adverse effects which included runny nose. 0.01% of participants experienced a fatal allergic reaction. These drugs are still undergoing trials and our understanding of safety and efficacy can change in the future.
[ ] Check to indicate you understand and consent"
I think this should be the standard for vaccines, drugs like marijuana and alcohol and cigarettes. Do it at the point-of-sale. For things that are particularly dangerous, maybe require an interview with a physician to make sure the person is of sound mind and capable of consenting. I believe that if you treat people like adults they will naturally make the best decisions for themselves. When you treat people like children, they'll act like children.
We make trade offs of short-term benefit and long-term risk all the time. When considering the purely recreational intake of a substance, the long-term risks are more relevant (due to the relatively small short-term gain) than for a vaccine which has unknown risks but has now-proven significant short-term benefits.
Point was foolish consistency. I see an IT diktat that a function should not be longer than 100 lines. I would even go ahead and say seems reasonable for lot of cases. But to make it absolute would be foolish consistency.
Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects.
Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either.
So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
No two situations are the same, and demanding consistency at an arbitrary level of reasoning means disregarding everything you would see when looking closer. For example, banning something that has been legal for a long time is difficult because of the economic aftershocks and cultural resistance. If something new was invented that was just as harmful as alcohol, it might be best to ban it and leave alcohol legal.
FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
Also attempting to ban things that are both desirable and very easy to make is a great way to create an enormous criminal black market like we did with prohibition in the US.
Statesmen saying “alcohol is legal, might as well legalize everything else that is less harmful on some dimension”. Where the alternative may be just leaving alcohol as an exception, or outlawing it (but yeah… don’t mess with Americans and their Alcohol - see prohibition and the whiskey rebellion).
Suppose the law states that David Haroldson (or the Glorious Leader, or foreign diplomats) cannot be convicted of any crime. That's inconsistent, (perhaps) arbitrary, and unfair. Yet, it would be foolish to extend this conviction-immunity to everybody.
That can be abused as well. Just frame the leader for a crime and he sits in prison until it is proved that he is innocent, then do so again for a different crime.
For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
Arguing about consistency in a system without the rule of law seems a bit foolish as well. Diplomats are a more interesting edge case. And AFAIK they can always be prosecuted and convicted in their home country.
It’s not necessarily meant to be used as an argument as such. It could also be intended as a rhetorical device in order to force the opponent to concede on another point:
Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument]
Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society!
Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?
> but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason.
It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.
Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact.
If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase.
In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why.
Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.'
Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?'
Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.'
Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?'
Parent: 'Well, yes...'
Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?'
Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.'
This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions.
Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
> Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
> Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences.
'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine.
'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence.
'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'
These are what I consider to be the strongest reasons why my child shouldn't do cocaine in my country right now. If they go to a country where it's well-regulated, then the cost/benefits calculation changes quite a bit.
Not GP, but a lot of people have trouble distinguishing "illegal" from "wrong", and the cause and effect. It's "wrong" to take cocaine because it's illegal; it's bad to legalize cocaine because it's "wrong". Cocaine is bad because of all the harms it causes to society; but a lot of the harms it causes to society (some of them listed above) come about solely because it's illegal.
Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it.
There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries).
Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.
> Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it.
Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law.
Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law.
I'm fine with alcohol being the high water mark. We can fairly objectively rank the health and societal harms of various drugs. Hard to quantify, but straightforward to build an ordinal list. Caffeine, weed, basically all psychedelics, amphetamine, mdma, and tobacco all make the cut (the latter just barely). Coke, meth, heroin, unsurprisingly worse than alcohol, ought to have some distribution controls at the very least. Prescription opioids actually look surprisingly bad.
At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.
Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.
Counterpoint: alcohol is one of the best drugs on the planet for anyone on the spectrum of introversion to crippling social anxiety.
In all my (many) years, I have found no better path to becoming socially acceptable (even likable) to neurotypicals/extroverts than 3-4 shots of vodka. This is an unfortunate, but very real fact for many of us. I've heard good things about Phenibut, but (1) it's very difficult to obtain, and (2) it is also apparently habit-forming.
I’ve recently taken to trying Kava, which seems to be relatively popular among people trying to quit alcohol/benzos/etc.
Supposedly it also helps with disinhibition and socialization, but admittedly I haven’t tried it in a social setting so I’m not sure myself. It certainly does relax me and chill me out though without the dumbing down of alcohol.
Of course, by the things I’ve seen in those “pop-medical” sites that fill Google search results, you’d think it’s much more dangerous than alcohol.
Kava is great and for sure is wonderful in a social setting. I've taken to Kava recently and enjoy it casually (1 to 2 times a week) as its a shorter duration than alcohol, I get no hangover, and while I relax I don't lose my inhibitions. I also have drank it at a kava bar and find it to be an enjoyable social experience where the atmosphere is very bar like. I'm not totally against alcohol but Kava for sure is underrated and scratches many of the same itches as it were. Highly recommended.
Can definitely second kava. I went to a kava bar several times a few months ago and found it to be a great alcohol alternative. It also filled the niche of being a place where the atmosphere was more similar to a cafe so I could read a book or work on something in isolation, but without the downside of caffeine where you can't do that in the evening without ruining sleep quality. The social effects were definitely there.
Like you said, the crowd was largely people trying to quit or who had quit alcohol or benzos along with a fair amount of neurodivergent people. Being able to set aside some of my social anxiety and talk with them is part of what led to me getting assessed and diagnosed for autism recently.
The grandparent comment also mentioned phenibut which I find even more enjoyable, but like they said it can be habit forming and has a tolerance build up that limits safe use to once or twice a week.
I love kava. I used to use a lot of substances when I was younger, but quit for health reasons. Still, I get bothered by stress pretty often. Kava at the end of a long day is exactly what I need. Bonus points that there's no habituation.
I used to be devastatingly introverted. Alcohol helped, but it’s nothing compared to GHB or MDMA. Ecstasy will give you the gift of gab like you can’t believe.
minor edit: I should say I am ignoring the context of where it’s acceptable to do such things. You probably shouldn’t do G at Christmas with the in-laws. (Though our quarantine Christmas this year with friends…) I’m just making a bit of a pedantic bit that there are club drugs out there that are pretty wild in how they can open you up socially.
sure, but its not really socially acceptable to drop X at the company happy hour. also mistakenly falling into a G Hole at the local BBQ is generally frowned upon. Having a couple beers is unlikely to lead to career or social suicide.
IF the "few beers" turns into ONE too many, it will lead to the same career and social suicide. Driving under the influence, fighting, lewd acts, etc... I live in a state where Weed is legal. I don't see people high decide to fight everyone at the party. I have seen this with alcohol more than I care to admit.
G yes, but MDMA can hardly reliablyreplace alcohol for general social settings given that you cannot do it all that often without issues, and that it has an even worse comedown for most people.
> Counterpoint: alcohol is one of the best drugs on the planet for anyone on the spectrum of introversion to crippling social anxiety.
I completely disagree and I think you should consider the possibility that alcohol is creating your anxiety in the first place. My years-long struggle with social anxiety disappeared after I decided to quit drinking for good.
GHB is probably an even better replacement than Phenibut as it's safer, has less of a hangover/rebound and can be used more often to no detriment but it has a worse reputation, needs to be dosed correctly (taking twice the dose accidentally means you pass out for 4 hours), and if you for some reason end up using it 24/7 the addiction is as bad to kick as with benzos or alcohol.
Speaking from experience, as an older guy with crippling social anxiety and 30+ yrs of alcohol use/abuse, I can say that it superficially helps with social anxiety. However, it does not get to the root cause(s) of said anxiety. Professional help is needed to find and work on fixing those. The side effects, physical and psychological, of regular alcohol consumption are far worse than living with social anxiety. I also think it's unhealthy to try to fix one's psychological issues with drugs/medications without also looking at and trying to fix the reasons for their use in the first place.
Also, I now have to undergo quite a few yearly medical tests to keep an eye on my body after years of self medicating for my extreme social anxiety.
FWIW, I don't say these things as a teetotaler. I believe in harm reduction.
There are also many people who self medicate with opioids to treat chronic depression. I certainly wouldn't recommend that depressed people try opioids, but empirically it seems to be effective in reducing symptoms for some patients at least temporarily.
All drugs should be decriminalized. Shooting people in drug raids is far worse for those people than are the drugs. Likewise, locking people in cages with other misfits, criminals, malcontents, and addicts isn’t smart (especially considering that drugs are in the prisons too). If the goal is truly harm reduction, people need to simply work to convince drug users to not use drugs (whether those are opioids, alcohol, tobacco, meth, whatever).
I'm not refuting and generally agree with your sentiment here in harm reduction but I tried to see the collateral damage of drug raids vs drugs.
In the US the CDC reported 100,000 overdoses from drugs in the 12 months preceding April 2021[1]. I can't find how many people die from drug raids specifically but this Al-Jazeera article shows 1,068 people being killed by the police a year after George Floyd died[2].
And for a little more context Statista[3] shows 21,750 people being murdered in 2020.
Police kill at ~1% the rate of drug deaths.
Citizens kill at ~20% the rate of drug deaths.
An addict can become not an addict. A person killed by police cannot become anything other than a corpse. The severity of the harm has a temporal component due to time preference.
EDIT: Also, dying of overdose is both a symptom of illegality and of the addiction. If a thing is outlawed the production isn’t exactly regular and therefore strength/purity of the substance varies.
Agreed. I'm in no way advocating people dying from any source. Drugs laws are ridiculous in so many ways. I was just trying to wrap my head around what the true numbers are as it helps put things into context.
Oh absolutely. Something like marijuana should not have ever been a crime. It's absurd and horrifying to think of people spending their lives behind bars for that and many other drug offenses.
I am not sure where I fall on the all drugs should be legal argument but I do know that because I spent ~$400 to get a medical marijuana card I can legally buy pot at the local dispensary in my state and smoke it with zero repercussions. In the mean time the jails are absolutely full of people who are there because they did not spend the $400. It is morally insane for that to continue. People are getting rich off selling marijuana in a dispensary while others are serving life sentences for selling it out of their home.
I take a lot of Non-FDA approved gray market and black market medicine. If all drugs are legal then such medical drugs should be legal as well. At least the ones I take are health promoting, non-addictive and non-habit forming.
I think a big part of the resistance to legalization is the medical establishment maintaining their monopoly supplier status on medicine.
Arrest them for assault...? Basically every study or reasonable implementation of decriminalization has shown both fewer negative effects of drug use, and in many cases decreased drug use itself.
So there is in fact a simple answer, and I think you'll find that drug laws were likely conceived much more cynically than for the protection of the common person.
We have already (as a society) decided we will no longer forcibly help people, so what do you do with someone that hurts others to feed their addiction?
Put them all in jail for every little offense? Fine them? (they have no money) Force them into rehab? (another form of jail) Let the roam the streets attacking people? (recycle through jail or rehab)
Assault is not a "little offense". Anyone convicted of criminal assault should spend a significant amount of time in prison (regardless of whether they're a drug addict or not) in order to protect the rest of society.
Assaulting people for drug money is an artifact of the drug war, not the drug. Alcohol addicts don't typically assault people for alcohol money. Alcohol gangs do not shoot each other up on the streets over alcohol territory. Or they haven't since 1933.
What you are thinking of as the side effects of drug addiction are mainly the side effects of prohibition. Alcohol addiction is a serious problem, with serious negative consequences. So we made it illegal. And then we had two problems instead of one. Drug laws do not decrease addiction rates. They do make drugs unnecessarily expensive, and force addicts to interact with violent criminal gangs to get them. The negative unintended consequences of drug prohibition are worse than the problem they purport, but fail to solve.
Why am I forced to choose any or just one? Why do you think alcohol does less harm then any of the others?
Currently far, far more children die due to alcohol than the others, and while that's definitely due to availability it's not obvious that wouldn't still be the case if all were legal.
> Why do you think alcohol does less harm then any of the others?
A simple test, give each to a baby/small child and see what happens... I lived in a time where babies were given tiny amounts of alcohol for pain relief and it did no harm that I ever heard. I doubt you can say the same for meth.
You are mistaken. Vast numbers of American teens are prescribed amphetamines every day. The main difference between elicit recreational methamphetamine use and medical/psychological amphetamine use is circumstances and dosing. Kids on Ritalin are generally in safe situations where they have consulted a psychologist with the involvement of their parents, and are given a pure, unadulterated, small, carefully dosed amount of amphetamines. Meth addicts are typically people with more serious mental issues and in precarious situations, given massive and uncertain doses of unpure, perhaps adulterated amphetamines.
The disparate outcomes of those groups are much more about the dosage and the personal/social situation.
Pharmacologically, they are pretty much the same drug.
I believe that the consensus is that it did cause a small amount of harm and there likely are horror stories you never heard, that's why the practice stopped, but giving children meth is called adderal.
Children also had regular access to small amounts of coke and heroin probably in your grandparents or great grandparents life, remember Coca Cola and laudanum was used for teething. You've never heard of harm from that. Your test says all of them pass.
But if the person they attacked dies, arresting the attacker after the fact doesn't bring them back to life. Do you also think DUI should be legal until you get in a crash?
> Do you also think DUI should be legal until you get in a crash?
No clearly we should charge anyone found in possession of alcohol with a felony to lower the possibility.
Drinking is not a crime, being drunk alone is not a crime, driving is not a crime. Being drunk, while driving is. On the other hand, assault is a crime regardless.
I can agree with that, but what is it? It can't be forced rehab, that is just jail but different. And addicts by definition _won't_ seek help or a solution.
I don't agree with your definition, often people affected by addiction will desperately seek help. Unfortunately, many fall into relapse cycles and it's a long and hard process to recovery.
I think a good solution would be making quality non-forced resources available for free. For example, rehab, therapy, or jobs specifically created for those seeking to overcome their addiction. Ideally these programs could pay for themselves in net returns for society as a whole.
Sorry for the late reply. I think much of the help available is cost prohibitive, I think addiction treatment programs should be free. A much better use of money than locking people up in cages which is both inhumane and more expensive.
I would argue that any drug that are depressants would have a different effect when high vs when the user is in withdrawl. Marijuana is considerably different than narcotics from my first hand experience/witness of it's effect on people.
Dope heads don't jones for their next hit. But I have seen a sweet young naive young teen turn into a mugger from meth.
Do you really think it's worse than the current wave of synthetic opioids? I think I could even make a good case for cigarettes being worse than alcohol.
To be clear, this data is showing correlation, not any kind of causation.
Regardless, if we accept the argument that people need to be coerced for their own good into avoiding harmful behaviors, the data linked seems to argue that we should be restricting access to sugar and high glycemic index foods (flour) much more than alcohol since "High blood sugar" at 6.5MM and "Obesity" at 4.7MM both beat alcohol by a large margin.
Yes, I agree that we should do more about unhealthy foods. Not restrict access to them (after all, smoking is also not illegal), but set in places incentives that nudge people towards healthier foods (these can be financial, educational, psychological, etc.).
While I don't disagree with smoking being extremely harmful, most people addicted to nicotine can still function regularly. Regardless of which kills more, they both kill via proxy and that's where I see the biggest issue for both of them. Interestingly enough I've found that many people smoke when they're drinking.
This doesn't include all of the other harmful effects from alcohol, like violence and injures. How much marital physical abuse happens due to alcohol? I'd rather have someone harm themselves from smoking then someone beat their wife while drunk.
Not to defend violent alcoholics, but people who get violent when drunk already have a problem, and would also violent when sober (they probably are). Most people who drink are not violent.
Regarding injuries: Sure, but the statistics in general doesn't include stuff that doesn't kill you but still is bad, like non-lethal lung problems from smoking.
Source? 35 feels realllly young, but I guess it depends on what’s considered an “average” alcoholic. If someone is spending their entire day drinking string liquors everyday, I can maybe see that.
I was being approximate, but here is the more nuanced explanation:
"This study found an average of 93,296 alcohol-attributable deaths (255 deaths per day) and 2.7 million YPLL (29 years of life lost per death, on average) in the United States each year."
I don't know, the ways in which they stack up is like apples and oranges. Cigarettes are certainly bad for you, and it's known they cause cancer but cigarettes don't have the same severity when it comes to withdrawl in my understanding. Alcohol withdrawl can cause hallucinations, seizures, even death. Also, I would say the danger is greater with alcohol because it impairs your judgement in a far greater way than cigarettes... have you ever been scared of someone who is driving while smoking?
Extrapolated out over time, I would guess that alcoholism is a cofactor in more deaths annually than cigarettes (edit: that is to say, deaths not caused directly by drinking, including drink driving, but conditions such as diabetes and heart disease which are greatly exacerbated by drinking for example... I wonder if someone who dies of cirrhosis gets chalked up as a death by alcohol?)
I wouldn't be surprised. There are studies that are beginning to link liver health to neurodegeneration, and that's just one set of potential disease states.
That's interesting, I do wish it had a few more items on the "lower" end of the harm spectrum, just to help me gauge this better. Things like Caffeine, or the other "Energy Drink" supplements.
There is such thing as a slippery slope and a dam that overruneth.
We’ve inherited use of alcohol over millennia —it’d be an uphill battle to rid ourselves of it short of fundamentalist dogmatism.
Some places in Central Asia have socialized opiate usage —but they too have unwritten rules about usage, or at least traditionally had them observed (it was a ‘luxury’ of old age).
If you allow an anything goes policy, you’ll end up with a decaying society. While I don’t propose prosecuting consumption because it’s the wrong focus, we should prosecute production and distribution of hard drugs.
Else you may end up with the likes of XIX century in China, or huffers in metro Manila.
Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent.
I've never understood the arguments like yours, which I used to hear a half-century ago in high school, and now see presented online. They distill down to "We allow this one bad thing, so we should allow all of the other bad things, too." As if having more bad things is better than having fewer bad things.
I don't drink, so I don't care if alcohol gets banned or restricted or whatever. But these type of arguments always strike me as little more than "Billy jumped off the bridge, so I can, too!"
Agreed. Banning it has been tried at least once, in the USA, and apparently it didn't work very well. There were too many people that wanted alcohol and were willing to defy government to have it. Government is at least partially (more in some countries than others) by consent of the governed.
But also on the contrary to your "none of the other drugs" point, I can't think of any possible reason why cigarettes weren't outright banned 40 years ago, except that they have exactly the same mechanism keeping them legal.
I agree with the point on consistency, but must substances be viewed through the lens of "abuse" and "mental health"? It's not clear if you are implying that use of alcohol is generally a form of drug abuse related to mental health. In fact I'm not sure we can adequately define what is "abuse" in this case.
Take for instance Lemmy from Motorhead, who used alcohol and drugs heavily throughout his life and probably died an early death as a result; can that really be considered abuse when he, pardon my French, didn't give a shit?
For some people, things like alcohol are a serious issue and overuse can stem from both physical and psychological addiction. Then you've got people who use it sparingly. And yet there are people who drink heavily, know exactly what they're doing, and can't easily be classified as addicts without projecting one's own life choices unto them.
Just to show how facile this reasoning is, let's flip the bit:
"Alcohol is one of the worst 'drugs' on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should make sure we keep other drugs illegal by default unless shown individually, through decades of research, to be safe. Otherwise we will burden our healthcare system and create a national catastrophe. As evidence of this danger, I submit the history of alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and liver disease, and their effects on our healthcare system."
I offer that you can only do one of two things now:
1. Argue against my advocacy for inconsistency using personal incredulity
2. Provide a deeper argument that relies on something more than an appeal to consistency
Edit: added a clause to sweeten my argument for inconsistency
I hate the term "legalize" because all things are legal (in the U.S.A.) until they are made illegal. "Legalize" verbiage constantly tells people that they have to be selectively given rights, not selectively taken away.
I would much rather legalize pot over alcohol being illegal. If alcohol had the same usage as pot we would have far fewer deaths. My only complaint is that pot smells awful (though alcohol isn’t much better).
No not be a total joke as a gov't. I love the stories on "refer scare" and the prohibition (which has become some big historical period like the renaissance, merely by retarded gov't policy).
And not like we're done with it. New Zealand is considering to ban tobacco sales to the next generation. What could probably go wrong with that? Is age discrimination now all of a sudden okay? (this is not about prohibiting sales to kids -- which im cool with obviously -- but also to adults of the next generations, when they are of age).
The only reason tobacco isn't banned straight up is it would cause untold disruption in the older addicted population. By banning sales to younger people, they are trying to prevent the next generation from becoming addicted, reducing the impact a future complete ban would cause. It's a temporary solution that will eventually lead to total ban.
This line of reasoning doesn't capture any nuance. These kinds of things operate on an allowlist. Unless there is a law enacted specifically as an exception then no, in general age discrimination is not okay.
Voting, alcohol, weed, driving, truancy, parental control, marriage, consent for sex, contract law, criminal law, social security, retirement accounts, and military service all discriminate based on age despite it being the guiding principle that you should avoid using age for restrictions when possible. The law has plenty of examples of min and max ages.
If there was any other way to ban cigarettes without making life miserable for people who are currently addicted? Because we should absolutely ban cigarettes. The victim is the cigarette smoker and the crime is the manufacture and sale of a an addictive substance that it not safe to use in any amount.
I agree with you that a law making it illegal for people to smoke is silly, the law should apply to manufacturers and distributors.
Most victimless crimes have literally no victim. There is no victim without some sort of harm. The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal is because if you go overboard enough with them there is a high likelihood of harm. In the vast majority of cases people don't go overboard and there is no actual victim though. These things are crimes because our system of justice is not good at punishing people for "going overboard" with the consistency and fairness we desire.
> The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal
Are very different reasons.
Drugs are illegal because of big alc biz lobby, religious interference and orchestrated mass hysteria. The effect: the police can target any group, search them hard and lock some up because "drug". If the police would search hard in Beverly Hills they'd also find a lot, but they choose not to. It gives the police the power to hurt any group they choose because we all do drugs.
Speeding is an offense because it causes harm to others in some cases. Also there is an environmental impact. You choose to roll your car in public roads, you need a license, a proper car and to follow the rules. Cars can be seriously dangerous for other people on the roads. And it is in most cases "an offense"! Not a crime. You get a fine, not a jail sentence.
While I disagree with some victimless crimes, like drug possession, victimless crimes that put others at risk does victimize them.
It’s the reason that shooting a shotgun down a busy street is (and should be) a crime even if you don’t hit anyone.
Also, many violations of regulatory requirements are “victimless” but are entirely necessary cooperation for things to work properly, or to prevent consequential harm. Particularly for things where shared resources are used, like spectrum, roads, airports, the air we breathe, etc.
Who is hurt when I blow a little bit of lead dust into the air? Probably no one, and certainly nobody identifiable. Who is hurt when everyone blows lead dust in the air? Potentially many, and still likely unidentifiable.
You aren't getting it. Who does the bare risk itself victimize? Where is the damage? The risk is just that, a risk. There's a chance it may go bad and a chance that it may not. The risk produces no damage, no victim. But in sufficient quantity the bad outcome will happen enough to be worth making the activity is not allowed. Normally we prohibit the bad outcome but for some highly subjective cases we have to just draw a somewhat arbitrary line.
Risk victimizes those who are exposed to it. When it is trivial to identify a single person who is exposed to the risk, we don't call it "victimless", we call it "endangerment".
Why, when an act exposes multiple unnamed people to a risk, do some call it a "victimless" crime? Just because it's difficult to identify those exposed to a risk doesn't mean that people haven't been placed at risk.
If you share the road with a drunk driver but they crash into someone else are you a victim? Does their insurer compensate you?
Being exposed to risk does not make you a victim. You need to actually be harmed.
If your brother takes opiods but stops you are not a victim. If your bother takes opiods, gets addicted and ruins your family then you are.
Shooting a gun in the air, speeding, all sorts of unsafe things can have no victim, or they can have a victim depending on how things go.
We don't criminalize these things because they have victims when you do them right. They are usually victimless. We criminalize them because there's too much luck involved and we don't like the odds.
> Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale
Addiction is, not alcohol in itself. I haven't been anywhere close to drunk in a decade. I still enjoy a glass of whisky or a cold beer here and there.
People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait. I've seen the damage of weed in my friends, it's just as bad as alcohol tbh. I never understood the "it's bad so let's legalise other bad things"
>People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait.
You're blatantly assuming here and making it a categorical statement. They usually don't, neither statistically or at least in my experience, anecdotally. I and many friends of mine regularly drink, but most of us barely touch other drugs. Weed occasionally for some of my friends (I personally dislike it intensely) but things like coke and so forth, pretty much nothing, in a wide group of people who are regular consumers of alcohol.
Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution. So I don't think "we allow one bad thing and we can't get rid of it, so let's allow all bad things" makes a particularly compelling argument.
(FWIW, I'm generally not against legalization nor do I think all drugs are net-negative. I just find the argument as laid out to be unconvincing.)
> Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution.
It was recognized as impractical fairly quickly, despite having fairly similar concrete outcomes to the drug war, for which a similar recognition has been much slower and less complete. But, again, that's just another layer of inconsistency in the same direction, not a mitigation of it.
Again, I'm not against legalization. But I'd like to see more concrete mitigation of the downsides. Just stating that we should aim for consistency does nothing about the blowback. "Legalize it to be consistent" seems as facile a solution as "Prohibit it because it can be dangerous" in that they ignore the complexities of implementation.
Let's keep it practical. Alcohol is here to stay and will not be prohibited. For historical reasons, culture, whatever...it stays.
Yet other harmful substances are currently banned and you opt to unban them for...consistency. It's like saying when two countries are at war, why can't we all be at war? Seems "unfair".
This comes from the point of view that harm is a scalar quantity. There are many different dimensions of harm and they vary wildly for each activity/drug. Reality is more nuanced than any single measure we select.
I would consider it the worst or most powerful drug in terms of access, addiction and intoxication. It's literally poison, and what it can do to an individual I feel is unlike most other illicit substances.
Alcohol is only a problem because some people do it so much. Alot of people I know drink all the time-- like several times a week. They could look a little younger but generally have passable bills of health.
Also we have to question who's behind this statement. For all we know it's the PRC starting a new teetotalling campaign in their land.
What about meth, fentanyl or oxycotin? (to name just a few)
I would consider these more literal poison by comparison to alcohol by any objective manner. If they are all legal, then access/addiction/intoxication are not even close to compare to alcohol, they are all far worse.
They're not poison though based on they way they work with neuroreceptors whereas alcohol limits neurotransmission all together. None of them are good, and in excess they're both terrible.
The worst thing about alcohol today is how America is letting alcoholics dictate pandemic responses, as if we believe that bars are more important than schools.
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse does that, whether it's treatment facilities or social groups like AA and Al-Anon. As they should. Every family I know has been affected in one way or another by drug or alcohol addiction and has firsthand knowledge that substance abuse must be treated like an illness and to forgive (but not forget) the damage it causes. So I'm not exactly sure your statement reflects reality.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with an acute cancer treatment or recover from a kidney transplant.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with alcohol addiction.
Measure the immediate reactions and future performance review and employment outcomes of the two groups. Do you expect them to be the same as each other? I don’t and I think it comes down to “I or a family member could get cancer or kidney failure” vs “alcohol addiction is a choice” thinking.
Apples and bowling balls. As I said in another comment:
While substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
I think many managers would prefer the latter because getting sober should have mainly positive effects on my employee's health and performance whereas an organ transplant or cancer seems much more likely to come with longterm disability and accommodation needs...
"Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse" is a small percentage of the population as a whole, and a very, very small percentage of the people who make policy and resourcing decisions related to how substance abuse is handled.
You may be in a particular microcosm that handles this well, but that is definitely not the universal experience (not by a long shot). I'd also dispute the "literally everyone" part of your comment, as I can think of countless examples of attempts at substance abuse treatment and support being actively harmful to the person struggling with addiction.
Treat here not in the "provide medical care for" sense but in the "interpretation" sense, as in, "I know it's a polka, but I'm going to treat it like a waltz."
Once again, I think that's a fun thing to see because it's always nice to dunk on the broader culture, but that's genuinely not been my experience. People are generally very understanding and considerate of substance abuse situations and the carnage that surrounds it.
And it should be noted that while substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
Back in the 90's I worked on a concrete crew for a summer. Building big box store type buildings. They pour the floor, then pour the walls on top of the floor, then tip the walls up and weld them together with metal flanges embedded in the concrete.
Nearly everyone on the crew did meth (except like 2 guys, I was one). Often work would start like 3:00 AM to prevent rapid drying. No lunch to speak of. Expected to literally run on the job site from one task to another. I suppose there may have been potential labor complaints but they never happened or weren't investigated.
It wasn't unusual for people to burn out and just not show up. That was part of the calculus I think by management. One guy fell asleep in his truck and could not be woken up (after presumably being up for a few days).
I quit after a few months but later saw my (low level) supervisor at a restaurant. He was alone and didn't look good. He told me how his life had gotten increasingly out of control and he had tried to kill himself (before finding Jesus per his words).
Company didn't care. They were making money. They turned a blind eye to what was going on. The human wreckage generated was awful however.
You think if meth is legal over the counter this won't be more prevalent? I'm pretty sure it will. Meth kills, and not just the body.
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.