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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

> All in all, such substances are not natural...

But they are natural, aren't they? No less natural than the watermelon we are all eating (it might be cultivated), and I don't see anyone wanting to criminalize eating watermelon. Weed, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaves, poppy, they are all natural.

Also, even if it's natural, it has nothing to do with its dangerousness, so I don't follow your argument.

With regards to legalizing it, I'm on the side that if alcohol and tobacco are legal, weed should be legal, too. They are all bad for you in some sense, but we need to balance that with freedom and individual choice, and to me, they are pretty similar.

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By natural, I meant, natural for regular human consumption. Not as in natural from mother earth.

Alcohol and tobacco are extremely dangerous and detrimental to any society.

What blows my mind is young teens, barely out of education, harping and celebrating the ability to drink. To me, that's insane. Why does a young person need to drink alcohol? When studies after studies have show how it affects human life in general. From health issue to societal problems to relationship issues.

In my view, alcohol should be shunned and should never be glorified.

When you bombard a child with images, videos, movies and acts of drinking day in and day out, you normalize it. And that is terrible.

> Why does a young person need to drink alcohol?

I think there is a cultural aspect. As a kid in Italy (>10yo), it was "ok" to have a glass of something like beer+sprite or wine+sprite during a meal. Maybe 1-2% of alcohol, it was cool and would obviously not get you drunk nor tipsy.

Having a glass of wine during a family meal, or a beer with your pizza with friends, was likewise pretty common and done mostly because of basic gastronomic pleasure.

This is _very far_ from the binge drinking/getting wasted culture which has been prevalent in the anglosphere for a while, and that has sadly expanded to a large part of the world since.

It's not drinking that should be shunned, but getting drunk.

Exactly on point. In Portugal, another southern-europe country, the rituals are quite similar. Drinking is normal.

Getting drunk though, used to be very not appreciated and shameful. Actually it is not very "macho" to be drunk because then you look vulnerable; out of control. The contrary of the cultural form of macho. This goes to the point that there used to be a thing where people who got drunk knew they should either quietly leave or just be very quiet. Hell even I still follow that. The downside of that is that alcoholism in Portugal is a very private matter and often not properly treated. Families break apart, but nobody from the outside sees it. When drunk, leave or shut up.

One thing I have a bit of a difficulty in Poland is that generally people have a very fast drinking rhythm that I know will lead me to drunkenness pretty fast and i come out as a wuss or not a jolly guy, because I reject such rhythm. On the other hand people look at me sideways when if I drink regularly a glass of wine or beer at meals. One of the things that got me a bit sad was losing the ability to drink a beer(20-0.33cl) beer at work break lunch as this is illegal here and very frowned upon. Another thing is the drinking and driving. In Portugal and quite a lot of countries in Europe(Germany for example) the blood-alcohol limit is 0.5, which allows for a single glass of wine or a 20cl beer, but in Poland it is 0.2 which means one is effectively banned from drinking at all if driving. Truth be told I believe the 0 drink and driving is the way to go. I know of too many situations where people start with good intentions and get carried away. Nowadays when i go to Portugal I feel be guilty if i even touch a drink at a meal and drive afterwards(very common due to the restaurant culture).

In Portugal, nowadays there is a normalization of the drunkenness in younger people as a way to signal one is having fun, but it feels an imported thing. Binge drinking is also on the rise, with day to day drinking falling.

They are not "natural" in the sense that humans don't consume ethyl alcohol to survive, in fact it is often quite damaging to biological systems. Apart from some microbes I'm not aware of any other organisms that use alcohol as their energy source. Alcohol/thc/caffeine/nicotine (you name it) do not fall in the "natural" diet of humans. Most psychoactive substances are metabolites which plants/fungi store in them to deter other animals from eating them.

Humans aren't the only mammals on this planet that consume alcohol.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/07/01/drunken-monkeys-and-our...

That'd still be "recreational use", not as staple food

Is anybody in this discussion advocating alcohol as a staple food?

A staple food is something that makes up a dominant portion of one's diet; it's beyond a mere common or everyday food.

    A staple food, food staple, or simply a staple, is a 
    food that is eaten routinely and in such quantities 
    that it constitutes a dominant portion of a standard 
    diet for a given person or group of people, supplying 
    a large fraction of energy needs and generally forming 
    a significant proportion of the intake of other nutrients 
    as well

I would certainly agree with you that alcohol is not a very safe choice for a staple food!

Sure, but what if you tripped and sprained your ankle? Yeah it hurts in the moment, but would it cognitively impair you the next day? It certainly might; maybe when you're thinking about something while in the shower, you put too much weight on the ankle and the pain makes you drop your train of thought. I think the point that GP was going for was (or what I read at least) that there are many human experiences which cause some form of cognitive impairment; it's more important to see how deleterious the impairment actually is to the individual and to society before judging it.

>Alcohol/thc/caffeine/nicotine (you name it) do not fall in the "natural" diet of humans.

Well Sapiens likely consumed naturally fermented fruits even 200.000 years ago, after all we evolved to produce certain enzymes to digest ethanol.

Alcohol have shaped human cultures for thousand years, hardly unnatural.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/alcohol-...

Your argument is absurd. Sure, some caveman consumed alcohol that happened to occur naturally a gazillion years ago. So? You think huge factories producing alcohol and all the issues associated with it are justified?

By what you say, if whole of humanity consumed only naturally fermented fruit, I would half-heartedly agree.

> You think huge factories producing alcohol and all the issues associated with it are justified?

Humans also don't "naturally" need to be writing fictions, or draw pictures or make movies. And conversely, murder is pretty natural - take a look at how often it happens in nature!

Whether something is "natural" or not is a bit irrelevant - the big question is whether the action should be acceptable for humans to do. Drinking alcohol affects the person drinking it, but it gives them some comfort, or happiness. As long as they don't drink so much that it harms another person, i say they can do what they wish!

Same with pot and other recreational drugs.

Not just murder, wars and genocide.

Still we are not hamsters - hamsters can take 20x the amount of alcohol per body weight as humans, because for them it IS natural to base their diet on fermented fruits from their stashes. Humans are not like that.

For thousands of years humans routinely (e.g with every meal, even children) consumed low alcohol beer/wine), because it could be safely stored for extended periods, unlike water.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

Sure, just like lacto-fermenting foods to preserve them. However stored water could always be boiled? I have always thought it was funny that the most obvious "health benefit" of tea-drinking was boiling water to prepare it (yes, I realize not all teas are brewed so hot, and there are plenty of interesting compounds in there, but still...)

SSRI's or Benzodapines have severe side-effects, yet relying on them to survive isn't seen as disruptive to society. There may be an argument against self-medicating with Alcohol or Cannabis, but them being un-natural isn't it.

That's totally not the argument I'm trying to counter.

Maybe. It may be worth considering, however, that the reactions humans/other animals have to these substances are not necessarily accidental. Mammalia is young, plants are old, and have tamed us in many ways.

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