Pretending caffeine is as detrimental to our society as e.g. fentanyl is prime intellectual dishonesty.
I'm sure you're right too, but it's not a particularly convincing argument. I've definitely seen behaviors that horrify me from some of the caffeine addicts in my life. I bet caffeine prohibition would lead to a rise in domestic disputes, for starters, followed by Starbucks speakeasys and coffee cartels.
These are your words, not OP's. OP isn't claiming that caffeine is as bad as any other drug. They're claiming that it, like other drugs, is likely to have negative health effects that outweigh positive ones and that it's interesting that it gets a special place in our culture while other drugs get banned and shunned.
Nothing in that claim says that caffeine is as bad as the worst illegal drugs.
That alone is a strong and unsupported statement. Drugs frequently involve tradeoffs, but saying the negative out weighs the positive is not the same thing.
People would absolutely be burglarizing homes to feed their caffeine habit if caffeine wasn't dirt cheap due to the free market. If it were legal to produce meth your local meth-head would not be raiding your house for copper because it would be cheap enough that his minimum wage job could support his habit.'
And frankly I've showed up to important events absolutely fucking geeked on caffeine, feeling like complete dogshit, but because caffeine use is normalized no one bats an eye.
Those behaviors are not conducive to holding down most jobs. If our society did more work educating and supporting people in productively integrating their use of drugs into a functional lifestyle, maybe it would be less of a problem. Certainly there are some ways people could use meth that are positive. But I still think there's something about meth that makes it more likely to ruin lives than caffeine.
I've only ever been addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and while my withdrawal symptoms were terrible (almost-disabling headaches, anxiety, etc) I don't think they were ever so bad that it would make me violent.
As opposed to people I knew that were addicted to cocaine and meth which would go absolutely crazy for their next fix. In the particular case of the person that was addicted to cocaine, money was not an issue and would still become violent when the fix was not available, so I don't think it's necessarily a function of price or access to it.
Of course, my sample size is very small but given that I also know a ton of people that quit cigarettes and caffeine without becoming violent, I would say withdrawal symptoms are probably a strong component on how violent people get.
I'm about as caffeinated as most anyone else I know, and I would not. There are times where just putting on a pot of coffee is too much work for me to make my daily fix and I lazily skip it for the day.
I do get withdrawal headaches and probably behave a bit differently, but even then sometimes I don't make the effort to get it. I've been at conference and hotels where the only options were so badly made I skipped it for days and just took the headache.
240mg of caffeine for breakfast! Certainly!