Alcohol is really weird. It's unquestionably a pretty hard drug and yet it's (ab)use is completely normalized in our culture. It's also a drug who's abuse regularly kills people other than those using it.
People on opioids might steal and lie to feed their addictions but I think the harm to others in the worst case is a lot less.
There is also no easy way to prevent access to it. Anything with sugar can become alcohol, including staple foods.
For other drugs, you need to have access to some specific plants, or grow them specifically for that reason. Chemicals are even harder to get by, you need both precursors and technical skills.
If alcohol was some exotic substance, it would definitely be banned.
I don't think this is unique to alcohol. Nicotine and driving seems pretty okay, but I can't think of any other deadly drugs out there which wouldn't impair your driving.
EDIT: As other users have brought up, nicotine kills plenty of people other than those using it, in the form of second-hand smoke.
One problem with collecting this data is that breathalyzers are cheap, easy, well-known, and available. If there's an equivalent for detecting impairment from other drugs, I don't know of it.
The dose makes the poison though. There’s a reason low levels of alcohol are allowed while driving too
Opioids and hallucinogens and THC/CBD probably all negatively effect driving, but it's much harder to compare due to less study, less scale, and less data (federally illegal/obstacles abound to study many of those things).
Nicotine is not really a problem with driving, it's like caffeine in that sense...stimulants aren't as dangerous for machinery operation.
Opiates, benzos, and alcohol all affect technical driving skills in a negative way.
I’m not opening the THC and driving can of worms.
Stimulant therapy on adults with ADHD has been shown to improve driving skill. Furthermore, ADHD is found more often in cocaine users than in the general population, likely due to self-medicating tendencies.
I'm very skeptical of this claim. Do you have any evidence?
Note that impressions of ones own performance while on drugs are not necessarily accurate.
Cocaine and methamphetamine increase impulsivity, and “real users” (addicts) of meth in particular are prone to stay up for extremely long periods of time, long enough where the meth wouldn’t counteract the physical exhaustion, which would account for meth leading to more accidents in real life conditions.
I still maintain that cocaine or meth would improve the driving skills and response times for a rested person.
Yeah, it does look like the evidence supports that. Interesting stuff.
If restedness is the real factor, it becomes pretty difficult to regulate that. There are two problems I can think of:
1. I don't think that someone being on meth or cocaine meets the burden of proof to say they aren't rested.
2. People drive without adequate rest, even without stimulants. If someone is hasn't slept in 48 hours, it seems like it would be better for them to be on stimulants than not.