It's poison. If it never existed and someone tried to bring it to market today it would never fly. Should have skull and crossbones on it. Makes about as much sense as huffing gasoline.
Social anxiety is the true poison in society. Without it, we wouldn't drink nearly as much.
I have nuanced takes that don't agree with the take that I just wrote, but I find there to be a kernel of truth in it. I've fought social anxiety for years, and started out clubbing sober when I was 17. I did start drinking around 18 but mostly out of curiosity. It was only around the age of 30 that I really noticed that by then I did it to alleviate social anxiety. It caught me off-guard since my teenage self would scoff at the idea of it. I'd never need alcohol to alleviate my social anxiety, I'd just grit through it and talk to whomever I want. I think I just became a bit comfortable and soft. It's easy-ish for me to switch back though due to the reference experiences I have being a teen, dealing with social anxiety sober. So that's a huge blessing. Not everyone is that lucky.
In a regulatory domain? Perhaps not; however, we did try prohibition. It didn't go well.
> Should have skull and crossbones on it.
Which didn't work. So some people go the idea to poison it. Then people learned to re-distill it to avoid the blindness it would otherwise cause.
> Makes about as much sense as huffing gasoline
Most people don't regularly drink to the kinds of excess that would make this an apt comparison.
... Because it was already there. The hypothetical would imply a world where people weren't already high functioning addicts
It makes far more sense than huffing gas.
It makes the most sense a couple maybe few times a year.
The worst thing to do is over hype the downsides. People tune out and then have no real guidance to draw from.
The existing ones, sure - you get used to it. But for non-smokers, that's a visible indicator of what you're bringing on yourself if you start smoking, so it has a deterring value. It helps you to present an abstract idea into something palpable that you can't ignore that easily.
For scale context, the covid 19 vaccines killed almost as many people as alcohol yearly. Yet that one is "medicine" but alcohol is "poison"? Give me a break.
Of course there are morons who get killed by just about anything. Even water poisoning is a thing, and people HAVE died of it.
Sinners will die regardless of substance, because the wages of sin are death.