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Comment by stakecounter | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I probably should've been more direct but what I mean is that it's a disservice to the article to distinguish alcohol from all other recreational drugs like that. The way it's worded makes it sound like alcohol is not a drug at all, which opens up people's minds into treating the two differently even though one literally IS the other.

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The article talks about drug dealers. Unless you call the cashier at the local liquor store your dealer (and you're super weird if you do that; don't do that), it seems exceedingly clear from context that they're referring to illegal drugs. Blatantly ignoring contextual clues like that is obnoxious at best.

Wow, wtf? Why are you guys downvoting [username-redacted]? Of course a local liquor store is a drug dealer. You do realize the USA is not the only country in the world right, and that the USA is leading the world in cannabis legalization variously across different jurisdictions in the USA? Which drugs fall in the illegal set and which fall in the legal set depends on jurisdiction. Just because your mom and pop told you that drugs were bad, doesn't mean your mom and pop were expert ontologists / semanticists. "Drugs" includes alcohol and MDMA and cannabis. "Illegal drugs" depends on jurisdiction. I'm surprised computer programmers are having trouble with this.

Yes, but in an article about people who make a living breaking the law by selling illegal drugs illegally to people, it would actually be obnoxious and insulting to specify "hey guys when we talk about drugs we're only talking about the illegal variety"

Everybody understands that you're very clever for pointing out that alcohol is a drug too and that it's only ~The Man~ which makes some drugs illegal and others legal, but it's actually entirely irrelevant to the discussion being had in the article and your insistence on trying to appear clever is actually very tiresome.

Scientifically alcohol is a drug, culturally it isn't called that. Even go somewhere where people don't drink and they wouldn't use the term "drugs" as an umbrella to include alcohol.

> "Of course a local liquor store is a drug dealer."

Yes, technically correct, but just like jschmitz28 it's incredibly pedantic. The phrase "drug dealer" isn't used to mean "someone who technically sells drugs", it's used to mean "someone who sells illegal recreational drugs". In this case the mom and pop version is what absolutely everyone uses.

> Even go somewhere where people don't drink and they wouldn't use the term "drugs" as an umbrella to include alcohol.

Ah, interesting, I didn't know that. How many muslim cultures and languages are you familiar with?

That's my experience when people are speaking English, whether first language or not, in other languages I have no idea.

Right, but alcohol is currently legal in most English-speaking jurisdictions. So the places you're referring to are the least relevant to the question of whether alcohol is considered a "drug" by modern humans.

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