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Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

It’s also widely understood how to dose and consume it — the commonality of it makes it less dangerous on a micro level. And also much harder to convince people to ban it when the majority of people consume it.

Alcohol has existed and been consumed since before humans existed. It’s also trivially easy to produce alcohol yourself, naturally manifesting out of a sugary liquid, meaning that prohibition is ~impossible.

If you mean just from an effects standpoint than yeah alcohol is absolutely top tier dangerous. But unfortunately/luckily, society operates on more than just statistics. And trying to take the human emotion element out of decisions is hopeless.

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> Alcohol has existed and been consumed since before humans existed.

Ditto cannabis and opium poppies for example, arguably a million times more naturally manifesting than a distillation process.

>Ditto cannabis and opium poppies for example, arguably a million times more naturally manifesting than a distillation process.

Yes, but historically, alcoholic societies thrived and developed much better than stoner societies.

Source? Alcoholism took down at least one Mongol dynasty, and psychadelia was probably central to some comparably "enlightened" Greek societies.

No source needed.

There's a liquor store in every strip mall, every restaurant servers liquor, every concert or sporting event serves liquor.

Meanwhile other drugs are heavily regulated if not outright illegal in most places still

The societies that drank liquor clearly dominated for this to be the case.

> The societies that drank liquor clearly dominated for this to be the case.

Wasn't LSD banned in the US because it got super popular and became a great "poster child" for the war on drugs? Not because it was not popular enough.

AFAIK caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are legal at this point mainly because they've been normalized. As in, people generally perceive them to have minimal risk, so there's not a lot of opposition.

Yes the risk is not actually minimal for any of those three. Even caffeine can be dependence-forming. But most people either don't know this or don't care.

It became super popular in a subculture that wasn't popular enough.

> The societies that drank liquor clearly dominated for this to be the case

You didnt think this through, Europe was a mongol raided, plague infested, dark-age shitshow untill they discovered tea and coffee. Id we are gonna go by 'drugs drive history' then caffeine is a top tier drug, and alcohol is crap.

But this has all the historifal rigour of "white people won, therefore everything white people do is the best'

You're missing the Chinese opium crirsis.

What would a few examples of "stoner societies" be? The only possible one I could think of (and it's a stretch) would be Jamaica, but I'm pretty sure the issues they've had are more related to the whole slavery thing.

How would you realize this about alcohol, but not about psilocybin? Or lysergic acid? Etc etc.

So the answer is not the age of the substances, nor the natural occurrence in nature. It's something more irrational. I propose that it's regulatory capture by massive industrial interests. See also: scaremongering against weed vapes by the tobacco industry, or the classic Reefer Madness.

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