Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
Not premium to humans.
Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806
> Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.
PBS Eons Why Does Caffeine Exist? (5:13 for the bit on bees) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI
> In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.
To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?
In boxing, you do not talk your opponent through as you knock him out.
In research, pick any field, say, astronomy, you do not mention that Earth is not flat and that the Earth orbits the Sun.
In biochemistry research, you do not spell out that nicotine binds to NICOTINIC acetelcholine receptors as an agonist, that's literally Biochem 101.
- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each
- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present
- etc.
You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
What about prions, or strange matter?
and I think talking about breaking molecular bonds though or bringing "fundamental forces" into this is misleading and disingenuous. the point of the OP is to say, "you can take anything in a small enough dose and its not poisonous"
And when you say prions or whatever like you were, my point is if you take small enough doses even of those, you won't be poisoned. you get what I mean, so lets not waste each others time on trying to confuse impossibilities with reality. you won't be getting hurt or die or meaningfully poisoned by ingesting one "prion" or particle of "strange matter". and now when you describe any "poison" with this model, say you ingest 1 particle of even a pure poison, you won't be getting hurt or die.
It was a joke.
What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
That's primarily because it's most commonly diluted 90%. Spirits (or everclear) have much lower intake required.
GHB ~8x
Ethanol ~10x
Methamphetamine ~10x
DXM ~10x
Cocaine ~15x
MDMA ~16x
Codeine ~20x
Methadone ~20x
Mescaline ~24x
Flunitrazepam ~30x
Ketamine ~40x
Phenobarbital ~50x
Nitrous oxide ~150x
LSD ~1000x
Cannabis/THC ~1000x or greater
Citation: Gable RS. Comparison of acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused psychoactive substances. Addiction. 2004;99(6):686–696. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00744.x
Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC.
Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses.
Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely).
2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls.
>80,000 U.S. Poison Control exposure cases in 2021 involving acetaminophen or an acetaminophen-containing product.
Careful because that's some opioids as well.
Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/7up/
https://medium.com/wise-well/lithium-the-nonessential-elemen...
Did the FDA ever say if 7Up was the one using it?
Lithiated beverages were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s. It was equivalent to the coca beverages, which included coca wine, coca tonic, coca teas. There was lithia beer, lithia spring water (because there were natural springs containing some amount of dissolved lithium salts) and 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda was a market leader. The "Lithiated" quality was on the bottle caps and it was in their advertisements.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog...
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-toxic-history-...
The FDA first banned lithium citrate in 1948. There were over a dozen deaths related to lithium toxicity. It is unclear which products caused these deaths. The FDA doesn't have to say which ones: they were identifying a controlled substance, not issuing a recall.
There was yet another FDA ban in 1949. You see, doctors had begun recommending low-sodium diets to people with CVD and related illnesses. So people cut out table salt from their diets. But lithium chloride was commonly available in the same medium. So your wife and restaurant chefs cooked with a teaspoon of lithium chloride; your dinner table at home had a shaker of lithium chloride; people "salted to taste" with this marvelous salt substitute. But the lithiated effects were, again, lethal, and this secondary ban put the last nail in the coffin for the next 20 years before anyone started playing around with manic-depressive patients.
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Imagine what effect alcohol has