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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that, it's also pharmaceutical drugs. As far as I know, I'm the only one to ever try to come up for an estimate of total deaths from all drugs, and people (including on HN) complained quite a lot about it.

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If you objectively try to figure out the most dangerous drug in the world, you'll quickly find out it's alcohol. Alcohol makes people act dangerously and kills tens of thousands in car crashes(in the USA at least). In the USA alcoholism is also normalized in popular culture but especially on college campuses. It's absolutely insane how we turn a blind eye to alcoholism and yet demonize drugs like cannabis and psychedelics which have comparatively little harm to others.

Yes but alcohol has been widely used by people since before there really were any laws at all. It's deeply established in social rituals, religion, etc. So it has been normalized for millennia. You can create policy to try to control new harmful things, while at the same time recognizing that other things are too entrenched to really do anything about.

And we do have the converse also. Driving under the influence of alcohol is strictly prohibited, but rules for other drugs are much less standardized.

Most countries allow driving under the influence of some alcohol. How much varies. Rules for other drugs are usually zero tolerance or observable impairment.

>So it has been normalized for millennia

Alcohol abuse is not normalized in most developed nations. America is a harmful exception.

I don’t know where you are getting this info from. Both legitimate data (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol...) and my personal anecdata support the fact that the US isn’t even close to being the country with the most normalized attitude towards alcoholism. Just visit South Korea and try to count the number of drunk salarymen passed out outside.

For those lazy to click the link: the US is 24th in terms of alcohol consumption per capita on that 2015 list of developed countries, out of 33 total. In the older list from 2010, which featured more countries, US was number 48.

This is a good case of statistics being insufficient without proper interpreting. There's a huge difference between the health of someone who has one drink with dinner every day and someone who has seven drinks in one night every Friday and passes out at a bar. Mere total alcohol consumption is insufficient to determine abuse.

Sure, but you'd need to give some evidence that the USA's distribution of consumption is notably different than similar Western countries, e.g., the UK or Germany, which consume 25-30% more per person than the US. Basically the US would need to have a lot more heavy drinkers and a lot more (near) teetotalers for it to have both a (non-trivially) lower average per capita AND more dangerous drinking habits.

I'm not sure if that evidence exists or is easy to find. From anecdotal evidence I can say that the people I've seen drinking in America either drink quite rarely (a couple times a week) and far too much at a time (vomiting) or hardly drink at all. Anecdotally I've learned that in parts of Ireland you can see people drinking very regularly but not so much that they get drunk when they do drink.

Your liver doesn't really care the time frame over which you drink the alcohol.

Are you sure about that? Steatosis is reversible if you give the liver time to recover, for example.

Whether it's one drink a night or seven on the weekend, yes, it doesn't really matter.

You are correct, but there could also be a point about binge drinking versus steady consumption.

Russia, England, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and large parts of Eastern Europe disagree with that assertion.

Seems like another unnecessary slam on America. I think the UK, Canada, and most of Eastern Europe have greater alcohol consumption per capita.

>> If you objectively try to figure out the most dangerous drug in the world, you'll quickly find out it's alcohol. Alcohol makes people act dangerously and kills tens of thousands in car crashes(in the USA at least).

Well no. If you want to be objective (in the USA at least) it's opioids. Also, If we had better stats on suicide I bet more would be done with opioids than alcohol, but I'm speculating at this point.

Here's my source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarmCausedByDrugsTable.sv...

That source is a few people in a room having a chat and creating a list of the most harmful drugs based on their opinions.

It's not really a source.

It's a survey from more than a couple dozen drug experts. If citing one expert is a source, then citing a survey of multiple experts is also a legitimate source.

That chart was an assessment of the situation in the UK in 2011, not the US in the present day.

Our drinking age is too high. This results in the negative outcomes related to alcohol use on campus, including habit forming behaviors that hurt people later in life.

I agree with this. I think the drinking age (21 in USA) should be several years before the driving age (14-16 depending on which State) -- if anything invert the two.

This way, young stupid people have a chance to get familiar with the judgement-clouding effects of alcohol long before they are able to propel a 2-ton weapon at others.

And long before they're on their own, susceptible to all kinds of peer pressure.

They didn't exactly turn a blind eye.

They tried prohibition in the US, it didn't work.

It did work, but there were a lot of unintended consequences. I no longer have the source link for this bit, but it's from a post-grad who extensively researched that era.

> It's a common myth that Prohibition did not work in the US. In reality it worked far better than those pushing for it realized. What we need to remember is that Prohibition was foisted on the US buy the upper class who felt that alcohol was keeping the working class poor and uneducated (the myth of Demon Rum is still a prevalent one today, albeit it's evolved quite a bit). Prohibition was actually effective at reducing the overall consumption of alcohol and shutting down illegal speakeasies. There were a number of unintentional consequences though 1) The alcohol industry brought in so much money to the state and federal governments that even the passage of Income Tax was unable to make up the loss. 2) Those who pushed for Prohibition never expected it to be equally enforced and once Law Enforcement was able to get working class consumption under control they started enforcing it on the upper class and politicians which of course did not go over well. 3) There was a surge in crime due to the creation of a massive black market which also encourage rampant political corruption both of which were a bad look for the United States. 4) There were so many loopholes in the Volstead Act that it was costing a fortune to enforce the law.

Not to mention that prohibition of a drug always makes the black market drug more concentrated and therefore more dangerous.

Prohibition worked in a not very meaningful sense. Alcohol consumption fell sharply at first but gradually recovered.[1] It didn't have the benefits its supporters said it would. Most people came to believe it did more harm than good.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w3675.pdf

The exact same consequences are being seen again today primarily in the opiate market

Just because alcohol is bad doesn't mean other things are not also bad.

I never claimed that. I think that's derailing the conversation. The point is that our cultural (and law enforcement) ideas around drugs are straight up delusional and entirely detached from reality.

It's pretty clear that US laws don't treat alcohol the same as most other drugs with regards to the potential for harm, but I think it's a big leap to say that Americans are "straight up delusional and entirely detached from reality." I'm sure people do underestimate the dangers of alcohol, especially for long-term health, but I feel like it's very well-known that alcohol kills way more people than e.g. marijuana.

And yet, one is legalized in every state and the other is a schedule one drug on par with Heroin (although legal in some states).

Right. But public policy does not correlate strongly with what the public wants. I’m making the distinction between laws and culture.

The drug scheduling regulations are delusional and do not reflect the actual research potential, medical use, or harm potential of drugs. I'd remind you that marijuana is scheduled more harshly than cocaine, and so are a lot of other relatively harmless drugs.

Yes. I’m making the distinction between the laws and what the people actually believe.

Just because murder is bad doesn't mean jaywalking isn't also bad.

Alcohol has both culinary and intoxicant facets. Mild inebriation as part of its consumption with a meal or social occasion is in my mind a different phenomenon, and when someone speaks of "doing drugs" they are referring primarily to the latter, not the former. Certainly alcohol among college students or party goers is "doing drugs." But wine with dinner can only be considered such if one is being pedantic/legalistic/reductionist.

I don't enjoy being drunk. I enjoy wine or beer in small quantities, especially with food. The production of both has deep roots as a means of preserving fresh fruits and grains, and dealing with potentially non-potable water supplies. That it intoxicates I'm sure makes it more attractive, but heavy intoxication is generally frowned upon in cultures where beer and wine have deep historical roots.

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