The thing is: alcohol is a very crude intoxicant, and we seem to have arbitrarily standardized on it as the Socially Acceptable Drug. I know this is obvious, but it really is stupid and it's worth reminding people how stupid it is.
I mean, take khat, for instance. Khat is a stimulant chewed by people in Yemen; it's their socially acceptable drug-of-choice. (It's so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes a significant portion of the country's agricultural resources.) But here? It's a controlled substance. Why? I don't know. Our drug laws are just crazy stupid.
I feel like we could do so much better in terms of recreational substances. People are finally getting smart about cannabis, but there are still so many possibilities we're not exploring. The fact that we're stuck with alcohol is ridiculous. Hell, even opioids are less harmful to the body than alcohol is (if taken at a steady, stable dose, which I guess is the hard part).
We should definitely be spending most of our scientific brainpower on curing diseases, but I feel like we could spare a few brilliant minds to work on better intoxicants. The masses deserve a safer opiate.
Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.
For example: Yemen has 35 cars per 1000 people to the US's 797. Yemen would have to leapfrog through several stages of development for drunken driving to become a blip on their public health radar.
Half of that country currently doesn't have clean water, and they're draining their acquifers dry … to grow khat. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Cholera outbreaks and a water-scarcity exacerbated civil war are simply a different class of problem.