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I may be old-fashioned but the substitute mind-altering drugs you're mentioning does not sound like a more responsible pathway.

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Alcohol is a mind-altering drug! And I expect it has worse long-term consequences than quite a few of the other drugs that have become more mainstream recently.

No. As much as everyone wants to cheer on weed it’s long term biochemical and mental effects are very real.

This is an argument I have had on both sides. One side demonized it, the other said it could do no wrong.

No, weed is not a one way path to a death sentence as you become a raving Satanist! But it also isn't harmless and there are things to keep an eye on, just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean it gets the all clear.

If you want to do it, go for it, but please be aware of the potential issues.

They are significant but so are those of alcohol. Most data indicates weed is safer. (This study puts it at about half in terms of harm to the user: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285843262_Drug_harm... . Alcohol ranks the highest in terms of harms to others but that is also a function of how widely it is used)

Yea, but the currently popular drug with kids is a tranquilizer normally given to horses. I'm not sure you have these things in perspective.

Ketamine is also normally given to humans. It is used in hospitals as a sedative/anesthetic, and also in depression treatment.

Used responsibly it's perfectly safe. Much less harmful than alcohol. I don't know why people assume that something is unsafe just because we give it to horses. Do you think people want to harm their horses?

it's really not

looking from the tail end of the generation, many of my friends ( and also I ) were led to believe somehow that things like marijuana, psychedelics, non-Alcohol have such low consequences that are entirely a rounding error compared to alcohol. which is ...

Indeed. Alcohol is so much more dangerous and damaging to peoples lives and the lives of those around them that it doesn't even compare. Alcohol would never be legal if discovered today. Compared to alcohol the risks of cannabis are a rounding error.

But that's only because alcohol is so incredibly dangerous. There is real risk with inhaling particulates and burning gases into your lungs. And it should not be ignored. It's just that compared to the lives ended by alcohol it is a rounding error and that makes it seem safe. Neither are.

Alcohol is deeply deeply ingrained in society. (Almost) universally. It has been for thousands of years. I just don't think you can extricate history and culture from how we set policy and views on alcohol.

While it may be rational to try to lump it with other newer dangerous substances, removing alcohol from humanity would be full on cultural erasure for many places. Not to mention to total destruction of entire industries that people's livelihoods depend on.

I guess a way to think of it is - if it was part of culture for 1000s of years it'll probably take at least 100s of years to phase out.

I agree. Individuals have the right to chose to damage their bodies if they wish. And laws already exist covering hurting other people while irresponsibly intoxicated. I see no reason to try to use state violence to prevent people from hurting themselves with alcohol. This doesn't change that alcohol is a poison and seriously incapacitating compared to say, cannabis.

No they don't. unless you think health care should be singularly the responsibility of the individual and we have no responsibility for caring for the sick or seriously injured even if they have lack the financial resources to cover expenses.

That's a very slippery slope. What are you going to ban next, extreme sports? Running too fast? Eating french fries?

All these poisonous foods should be banned yes. The biggest killler in the US is obesity and we are here talking about individual rights. 1/3 of people aee obese, 2/3 are overweight, I am all for individual liberties but when you have this deadly of an epidiemic I become a lot more practical than idealistic.

Rest of your comment is asinine and I won't bother to consider.

It is at most as asinine as your comment.

We could start trying to solve obesity through education and perhaps limiting advertising/marketing, rather than jumping to the massive of erosion of individual rights that you suggest.

Cannabis was the same to some extent. Psychedelics too in the context of rites.

Yes but not nearly in the way alcohol is.

Alcohol used to be safer than water to drink for a period in time.

Alcohol is engrained because it was safe to drink because of the process of fermentation. However, it had much lower alcohol content and certaknly the hard liquors we know now were almost never at all drunk.

Your comparing 1-2% alcohol consumed because the regular drinking water was not accessible and unsafe to 7%+ alcohol consumed for recreation. Disengenuous.

People have been drinking wine for 8000 years. Grapes ferment in the 10% abv range.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1714728114

Some Roman wines were drunk undiluted in the 14% range

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/vint...

By the wealthy. The average citizen or non citizen (who made up majority or close to at various points) was not drinking 14%. Its laughable you would believe fhat just because rhey found it. They also found some gold face masks, i guess they must have all been wearing gold masks then.

Your numbers are completely made up.

Extract a sugary liquid from fruit or malted grain, expose it to the pervasive and random yeast in the air around us and if it doesn't mold over first you'll probably get something in the 8% ABV range before the alcohol waste product inhibits the yeasts' metabolism. With some deliberate cultivation, which humans thousands of years ago figured out, you can selectively breed the yeast slurry in your vessels up to a 11-14% alcohol tolerance. They didn't know the science but they knew the process.

Leave it exposed and you'll eventually get a random acetobacter infection and ta-da, now you have a vat of vinegar. Which would still have utility, but is much less fun.

The 1-2% alcohol drinks were called "small beers" and were the second runnings off the grain that was used to make full-strength beers or barleywines. Humans liked variety.

And people drank water, not just alcoholic small beers, there are depictions of water filters dating back at least 3500 years, and a long history of water purification techniques, and a ton of ancient wells which were dug.

it was diluted bubba

Nice backtrack.

Not for the purposes of safety and sanitation. Dilute even 15% ABV wine (the high end) with contaminated water and you end up with a contaminated low ABV wine-flavored drink. Natural fermentation doesn't generate insta-kill levels of alcohol, it was the boiling of the wort or must that made dodgy water safe, the fermentation just kept it that way for longer.

You're clearly out of your depth on this topic.

there was some commentary on the amazing regenerative power of the liver on a post here a few days ago to this end. i did a little more homework and the way in which agricultural civlization and the ability of the liver to process ethanol evolved in parallel is profound. some settlement had a bumper crop of wheat enough to ferment over the winter and they were like, sheeeeeit and then the liver was like sheeeeeeeit

we've been collectively alcoholic for 15000 years, turning the body's chemical filtration plant into the body's largest organ that is literally called the liver, and we're supposed to give it up in 20 years? bosh. flimshaw

I don't think we will give it up in the next 20 centuries.

Alcohol is indeed dangerous, but I think it is misleading to compare the number of lives ended by alcohol to the number of lives ended by other recreational drugs just because there is a much larger number of people consuming alcohol. Almost everybody who consumes alcohol is not an alcoholic.

you should go look back at profiling and optimization

if you want to fix the most things with the least effort, you optimize the hot paths. in this case, thats alcohol and tabacco. they have the biggest opportunity

That's dumb though because then you just push people to other things and you will see the same issues arise as consumption increases to alcohol levels and there's a reasonable probability they will be worse. Already the percent of fatal accidents involving active marijuana found in the blood stream is higher than alcohol car fatalities. 40% vs 30%. Homicides show a similar pattern. And marijuana consumption is only 17% vs 54%. All time high for MJ and near all time low for alcohol.

Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.

What is “active marijuana?”

It means they had recently consumed marijuana enough to be consider under the influence of it. Marijuana that had not yet cleared the bloodstream. Active comes from active metabolites, their body was still metabolizing recently consumed marijuana.

That's in opposition to the inactive metabolites which are stored in fat and slowly secreted via urine for a period much longer than someone is under the influence of marijuana.

So saying active means that their body was still processing it and the brain CB receptors are still being engaged. Whether or not they were "high" might be debatable, but considering it's showing up in a FAR higher amount of the people involved in fatal accidents than any group of the general public it's a pretty reasonable conclusion that it played a role.

I optimize the things where I get the most benefit per hour of work. Banning alcohol is so difficult politically that it’s not obvious that this is the best thing to work on to improve public health.

Smoking kills several times more people per year than alcohol use. The CDC attributes 480k to smoking vs 178k from alcohol. People smoking cannibis likely smoke less than those smoking tobacco but it’s not safe. Maybe try edibles instead?

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html

I’m in the same age group and I agree but I feel frustrated that our grandparents went with “marijuana is the gateway to hell” as the social message.

I don’t know if there is responsible weed or psychedelic use (not my area) but I’m confident that responsible alcohol consumption exists.

Though I doubt any of it is a net benefit to society.

I have a couple friends in their 60s who drank a single glass of wine every day, for decades. Then, they decided to stop. They were amazed at how much better they felt.

Cannabis today is much stronger than it was in the 70s.

Potency is an interesting subject because in theory one should have consume less amounts over the same time period for the same effect. In other words, smoking one potent joint, while carrying its own risks, is probably healthier than smoking n > 1 joints to get a similar effect.

Cannabis, the literal plant, is strong than the 70s, but it's not like humans haven't been making concentrates (hash, resins, etc.) for 1000s of years.

In places in the US where it’s now been decriminalized, it’s a completely different beast from what it was in the 70s. So much so that the potency of the plants kind of isn’t even relevant anymore for typical users. It’s a far cry from when I was a kid and there was peer pressure to keep taking hits from a joint of unknown potency at too quick a pace to do any sort of dose control.

The people I know who are using it are buying it as tablets and gummies that come in 1mg increment doses, and taking exactly as much as they want to have, which typically isn’t much.

Vape pens are presumably also more consistent and predictable, and seem to be taking over. I can’t even remember the last time I smelled actual weed smoke.

It actually strikes me as much more healthy than alcohol culture, where dose control can still be a problem because it’s hard to tell how many units of alcohol the bartender put in your cocktail, and driving home afterward is still quite normalized.

I recall a "60 Minutes" segment on it asserting that cannabis today is much stronger.

I think their argument is that while it's stronger (and it is), it's also more predictable and has safer and more predictable delivery mechanisms.

Also, there are high grade derived products that do exactly what's on the label.

For an example of reasonable use: if you want to lower anxiety a bit, which is a primary driver of alcohol use, you can now reliably get a high CBT strain, or CBT gummies, or CBT vapes, and they are generally less dangerous and less addictive than other chemical solutions.

This would also hold for decriminalising party drugs. Most of the fentanyl deaths for instance are in people that didn't even know they're having fentanyl.

Yeah, more or less. From what I can tell few people really want to just smoke the plant anymore. That makes the THC concentration in the plant itself less relevant to a discussion of potential harm of cannabis consumption. Because there’s some amount of remove between the production yield of the raw material and the potency of the finished consumer product.

You can make an argument in the other for alcohol. Yeast can only ferment up to a certain alcohol concentration and then they die. But that doesn’t tell us much about the potency of consumer alcohol products because we have a variety of manufacturing processes for controlling alcohol concentration. These it’s less common, outside of home production, to just accept whatever unpredictable thing the yeast are doing and call it good.

It's still inconsistent as fuck. There's no real industry standards and analysis. The same gummies from the same pack bought at a dispensary can vary wildly in my experience. Pens are a bit more consistent. But yeah not as variable as the bathtub gravity bong rips of random weed that people got from who knows where.

Yes I find this a big difference in modern weed culture and alcohol culture. At my age most of my friends know their tolerance for weed quite well and we usually keep low dosage edibles around just to offer for friends who consume weed a couple times a year.

While I don't drink that much anymore, when I do I just kinda have a murky mental binder of how strong a drink is at a given venue I've visited before but even then it's very unsophisticated.

Idk, when I was young I was drinking heavily, today I drink some beers and smoke weed and I feel I’m much better for it. It doesn’t ruin the next day and I can do more things. But you can definitely overdo it. Psychedelics definitely can mess with your head, though, if not careful.

All recreational drugs, legal or otherwise, are mind-altering.

I think that is the point parent is making

It's a tiny bit "healthier" (high people are much less dangerous than drunk people), but it's still not particularly responsible.

But it is much cheaper. And Gen Z by necessity is more price sensitive than other generations.

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