Always amazes me that LSD is illegal while alcohol is legal, the latter causing all host of metal and physical ailments, the former causing mostly hilarious navel-gazing
And the Ken Burns documentary is fantastic: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
Alcohol is, for the vast majority of the time, taken solely for the impact on the mind.
Wine is tasty. Beer is tasty. Brandy is tasty. And (anecdotally) know many people who aren't just drinking them to get out of their heads...
I'm 41, and I still haven't acquired a taste for beer. I find it absolutely awful. I can tolerate most wines, but outside of extremely sweet dessert wines I have never tasted any that actually taste particularly enjoyable to me. I'm sure I could change that if I forced myself to drink more, but I don't really have any incentive to do so.
There are liquors that taste nice to me, but they are generally the ones that hide the alcohol taste quite well, like e.g. amaretto.
I'm sure taste is an element of it, but the point being that very few alcoholic drinks taste nice until you've spent a lot of time getting accustomed to the taste of alcohol without enjoying the taste first due to social expectations or a desire to get drunk.
Of course, once you've developed a taste, then you might seek out foods that balance spice with flavor, and you appreciate novel interplays between the two --- in the same way that a consumer of alcohol might seek out a variety of beer, wine, or liquor that balances flavor and alcohol content.
Yes, people enjoy the taste of these things, they have trained themselves to, usually because of the effects.
FYI not everyone using every other drug is trying to get "out of their head" either. A little cannabis or sedative use may be for relaxation. A little stimulant to stay awake and increase talkativeness and confidence. LSD does rather take people somewhere else though...
Plenty of people would pair a nice red with their pasta even if it had no other impact on their mental faculties, same with other drinks and food. I'm perplexed at such an unhealthy view of alcohol.
It's expensive, and I don't make any friends by drinking expensive drinks (my friends don't really care)
I would love to see someone make "virgin" versions of various stronger drinks I like, but so far they don't taste anywhere near as good.
It sincerely annoys me that drinks make me sleepy and such. I'm only having one or two, but I would like to still be able to study and play chess, AND have nice flavors.
I've even starting trying to find creative ways to water them down without losing flavor so I can enjoy them without the side-effects.
(I should probably mention that I don't really enjoy "sweet" flavors, so part of it is that only alcoholic drinks get the bitter/sour flavors done well)
If it had no effect they likely wouldn't have acquired the taste, so I doubt very much they would in significant numbers, no.
There is an element of flavoir choice. But just look at how many concoctions there are that are, at least the popular ones, designed specifically to make drinking alcohol a more flavourful experience, and to hide the taste of the base alcohol as much as possible while still getting it into the drinker.
I'm sorry, I just don't believe that, absent the positive effects of the alcohol, anyone would drink much booze.
Before modern times, the quality of water was terrible pretty much everywhere. Because of this, many regularly drank alcoholic drinks instead of water because it was cleaner due to the alcohol it contained.
Although they weren't drinking it because it paired well with their pasta, many times they also weren't drinking it because of the impact on their mental faculties.
And it's probably the boiling proces that really saved them, they just didn't know!
FYI one can teach oneself to enjoy the taste of amphetamines, if one creates enough positive associations with their use. I've been there.
I did coke for a few years, at first it tasted gross but I liked the effect by the end it was 'tasty'. That is your brains reward center at work, it shapes experiences that release dopamine and makes them more positive. In reality coke tastes like baby laxatives and bleach and alcohol tastes like fungal piss, as that is what they are.
And annecdotally, most pot smokers didn't like the smell at first, but are now quite pleased by it.
Would they still be tasty if they were 0% ABV? I think not.
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47635105_Nutt_DJ_Ki...) - in particular, check out the graph down the page.
Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances, LSD ranks far lower in this scale. Importantly, Alcohol results in a lot of harm to other people (violence, drunk driving, etc...).
Because it is the most popular one. The "harm to others" part of the score is not per user. At the margin, one typical heroin or crack consumer creates more costs to society than one typical alcohol consumer.
I bet if you put one alcoholic against one heroin addict, more damage across almost every spectrum than the heroin addict.
The post you reply to compares alcohol and LSD. The abstract of the linked paper says that heroin is one of the most harmful drugs, more so than alcohol to the user, but grouped with alcohol in terms of harm to others.
Maybe he read it in the message he was replying to?
"Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances"
Alcohol is most definitely the more destructive of those two.
Regardless, his/her interlocutor has hopefully had their eyes opened by the conversation, in which they said that even making the comparison was offensive.
"Alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of substances, LSD ranks far lower in this scale."
- The sentence comes right after he points to the chart of 20 drugs ordered by "harm score", where alcohol is #1 and LSD is #18.
- He says "of substances" without any qualification like "of those substances" or "of both substances".
- He mentions that LSD ranks much lower. However, both interpretations 1) "alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of alcohol and LSD, because LSD ranks much lower than alcohol in the scale of harm" and 2) "alcohol is unquestionably the more destructive of all substances because it's #1, and LSD ranks much lower in the scale" are possible.
Anyway, I was wrong.
I think, much like people get used to the death rate from Car Accidents, and don't think of Cars as dangerous, people have gotten used to Alcohol issues in society, and don't think of it as dangerous, when it very much is. (Front page of New York Times is discussing an Alcohol related sexual also case in Palo Alto that almost certainly wouldn't have happened if the two parties had been sober).
In addition, the comparison would work better with pot. Would you rather spend time with someone drinking a bit or that smokes a bowl every night? That gets to be a much more fuzzy.
In addition, there are questions like: Assiming folks are taking as many responsible precautions as would be expected, is it better to get wasted by alcohol once a month or two or to take some lsd once a month or two? What about once or twice a year? These sorts of questions are closer to mimicking most folks' use of lsd.
But most folks use such things in a much more responsible manner. Occasionally. There will be outliers, just like alcohol. Most folks don't get addicted: 25% of heroin users might, and the rest is at 10% or less (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/26/neil-woods-u...).
As far as dangers are concerned: Part of the danger is not having honest sources and not having access to good information (think about how much more dangerous alcohol was during prohibition). Sure, there is a risk of addiction, but you have that with alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, and a myriad of other things. Effects on society are heaviest on the illegal things because of the illegality. Current laws would cover a lot of the other 'dangers' much as they do with alcohol (don't be violent, take care of your kids, drive sober). We can regulate potency much like we do with alcohol. Sure, some things can be dangerous, but most folks aren't doing it in those ways. Just like alcohol. We just hear about the bad stuff more because of the political and moral stance on them.
The claim seems to be that only 25% of people who try the drug once will end up being addicts. While I doubt this claim in itself, I think this percentage would go way up if you looked only at people who had reasonable access/resources to acquire more of the drug.
If you keep doing heroin (or any opiate) and have the access/resources to get more, you will get addicted.
It may take a few successive uses within a given amount of time, but beyond that you will have physical withdrawal symptoms, 100% of the time.
This is not the same as alcohol, pot, or LSD, all of which are not physically addictive in the same way.
It may not be addictive in an identical way to heroin, but it is addictive, much more so than the other two you mention.
Yes, alcohol can have physical withdrawal symptoms for people that stop after already having abused the drug for long periods of time.
According to what I am able to find, even of alcoholics already with a long term problem, only 50% experience withdrawal at all, and only 3 to 5 percent of that 50% experience DTs (tremors) or seizures.
As far as I can tell, even these withdrawal symptoms result from damage to the nervous system, rather than being due to a sudden desaturation of certain receptors in the brain, which cause the craving most associate with addiction.
The big difference for me is the difference in the craving aspect, and the time and number of doses it takes to start feeling the effects of the "addiction".
I'm curious though - have you ever been around people on LSD? There's a huge amount of misinformation about it.
It has both acute and chronic health effects, it's addictive and it causes (or at least facilitates) all sorts of social problems including a lot of violence. It kills its users and its users sometimes kill or hurt other people when under its influence.
It always amazes me how willing people are to overlook the evils of alcohol while highlighting the evils of other drugs.
The line between alcohol use and abuse is a very fine one, plenty of people cross it all the time. Many of them end up dead.
If you look at all the people who try, say, cannabis, and count who gets addicted and who dies or gets sick from it, then compare those percentages to alcohol, alcohol comes out far, far worse.
You don't get to say "it's ok, those people were abusers, users are all fine" because the addictive nature means some users become abusers, and many, many people are harmed by it. That's the whole point of measuring harm, to see what actually happens when humans use these substances in large numbers.
Nowhere have I or will I say that drugs are not dangerous. But I'm afraid it's you that's absolutely wrong about the relative harms here. It's not a lie, I suggest you actually try reading about this sometime.
My recommendation to get started would be "Drugs without the hot air" by Professor David Nutt.
After many years of abuse, alcoholics can get to the point that their bodies dont function properly without some alcohol, but they already have to have a problem for many years to get to that point.
That's true; of the basic axes by which things are typically labeled "more" or "less" addictive (all of this IIRC) alcohol is high on habituation (which is sometimes not considered "physical", as if any behavior could exist without a physiological bases) and withdrawal, fairly low on tolerance and reverse tolerance. Cocaine has a dangerous combination of featuring tolerance and reverse tolerance, is moderately high on habituation (though perhaps not as strongly habituating as alcohol), and fairly low on withdrawal. Opiates are strongly habituating, feature significant tolerance effects, and have serious withdrawal (on average more severe than alcohol, but, less often fatal by itself than alcohol withdrawal.)
So, alcohol, while definitely physically addictive, and in some respects as much or moreso than cocaine or opiates, is, truly, not physically addictive like cocaine or opiates.
What's silly to me is that alcohol somehow gets excused from its acute effects (overdose deaths, accidents) and its chronic effects (cirrhosis, premature aging, weight gain, cancer and all sorts of other stuff, because it's just a beer... but drugs, nooo, drugs are evil, the big bad boogeyman.
Like alcohol some how isn't a drug!
It just pales in comparison to heroin and cocaine. And meth.
I would just put alcohol more in the habit forming category though, maybe a bit more potential than cannabis over the very long term.
Opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, meth, benzos, and even Ambien are in another league.
And I've never seen anyone die from taking "regular drugs" recreationally.
This is just a stupid comparison. You're comparing "a glass of wine" to a "drug user". A more apt comparison would be "someone who drinks three bottles of wine a day" and "a person who smokes heroin/crack/amphetamines daily" (IV use would be closer to drinking bottles of hard booze).
Both of these groups of people have an increased risk of death, permanent health damage, mental issues and a risk to others around them.
The theory that everyone who tries drugs will become an addict and a daily user simply isn't true.
> It's simply disconcerting that you encourage the use of illegal drugs saying that are not dangerous on a public website.
It's a perfectly valid opinion that drugs should not be illegal. You do not have to agree with that and you should definitely not be offended by it. It's a discussion that will likely be taken in your country too in the next few decades.
No-one is saying they aren't dangerous (and if they are, that's misleading), but making comparisons to e.g. alcohol and tabacco is a valid thing to do. And if you look at the hard facts, the illegal status isn't that obviously justified.
In all seriousness though, look at the facts: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm - Alcohol is responsible for far more deaths, in part because of its availability. For lack of a better resource, https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml - no one dies from LSD.
You'd do yourself a favor to avoid conflating psychedelics with highly addictive "hard" drugs.
I've never seen anyone die from a joint per day. Plenty of other drugs are the same. They can all be dangerous, including alcohol, if you take enough of it or take it too frequently.
> I guess that in some countries it may be even a crime
Not in any country I would want to be in. Who needs freedom of speech anyway?
To avoid a false dichotomy, you should say you'd rather spend your days with your friend who's drunk to the point of constantly hugging you and telling you "I love you bro, we're fucking bros, man, lets move to Mexico and become fucking PIRATES, man"
Last, it sounds like you've never been around someone who's on LSD, because at low doses they're usually very tame and can at times provide great conversation.