Counterpoint - fewer drugs should be illegal.
Laws should be illegal
I think that the dividing water should be always social harm, never individual harm. With that in mind, cigs are fine, weed and alcohol should have a few restrictions, but crack cocaine is a no-go.
As someone who greatly enjoys his alcohol - booze should have many more restrictions than it does - and weed should just be an age thing.
For buying weed age should be enough, but there should be a few usage restrictions (e.g. no driving after smoking).
For booze: I get your point but I’m wondering which restrictions would be sane, minimising social harm (alcoholism) without reducing too much individual freedom.
I guess I’m not really advocating for new laws, instead a shift in the mentality around the two drugs. Weed has been demonized a lot, but really isn’t that bad. I think public opinion is finally shifting on this. Alcohol has long been a cool thing - beer and sports are inseparable, having a drink after a long day of work is often glamorized in tv and movies… being drunk is fun, but it really shouldn’t be seen as cool.
Playing devil’s advocate here, second-hand smoke is real and harmful, so by your logic cigarettes should be banned
Banning substances only ever hurts those of us who need it as a coping mechanism to get through our already miserable lives as the peasants we are to them.
Like all the drugs that are starting to become legal?
Or, How about you throw the biggest drug on there, coffee…
Or the poison that people consume and cause streetfights and anger and vehicular manslaughter…alcohol
I think that the biggest drug is sugar and it causes more deaths than any other drugs combined.
My gut tells me much more alcohol than coffee is consumed. I think it would be better to call alcohol the “biggest” drug.
Not to diminish how prevalent caffeine use is. I’m drinking coffee right now.
Or we can go with statistics instead of gut reaction.
https://usafacts.org/data-projects/beverages
In the US it’s coffee by a wide margin.
Why are you restricting the scope to some random country, if the comment above doesn’t have such implication?
I suspect it’s the data they happened to find first.
Because it was just the fastest data source I could find. I was simply looking for any counter example. The point wasn’t strictly about the consumption of coffee vs alcohol, it was that there is an entire internet available to confirm or debunk a gut feeling.
So if you’re going to go into a discussion about public policy, back it up with facts and figures, not gut feelings.
So to highlight the point, not to answer it directly? Got it - that’s fair.
As I mentioned in another comment the situation gets a bit more complex when it comes to booze vs. java. For a single country you could theoretically “equalise” things to the most popular booze vs. the most popular way to prepare coffee. So besides data you also need some arbitration, it’s deceptively more complex than it looks like.
We can argue over how to finesse the numbers to most perfectly represent the statistics until we’re blue in the face, but it’s really not that necessary to make it that complicated. Besides 1 serving of coffee is a pretty well established quantity, and 1 serving of alcohol is also a well established quantity. That semantic argument has already been had and settled years ago so that everyone compiling numbers and taking statistics are all operating on the same page.
Besides 1 serving of coffee is a pretty well established quantity
Not really; unless you’re assuming that your local standards apply elsewhere. They aren’t - this varies wildly. For reference:
- Swiss site - 150~200mL
- Italy, reference standard - 50mL (moka) or 30mL (espresso)
- USA, standard serving - 177mL (six ounces)
- Brazil - 80~100mL? (eyeballed, can dig sources if desired)
It gets worse because coffee is ingested in multiple forms in the same place (refer to the Italian example)
and 1 serving of alcohol is also a well established quantity
Ditto as above.
This is not just “semantics” or “arguing to finesse the numbers”. What’s meaningful here, in the context of OP (drugs) and the question (alcohol being potentially more consumed than coffee), would be amount of caffeine vs. ethanol, but this isn’t the sort of stuff that you can simply say “learn to use Alphabet Inc.'s data vulturing tool” and call it a day, you know?
My gut tells me much more alcohol than coffee is consumed.
I’m wondering about a good way to measure this. It seems unfair to do it by litres of coffee vs. booze, given that concentrations change; and if you focus on kilograms of caffeine vs. litres of alcohol instead, it’s hard to agree on a “good” equivalency.
Caffeine has a second complication - you need to take into account other sources of it (tea, yerba mate), for a remotely useful comparison.
I’d compare number of people who make a conscious choice to indulge in them. Someone who grabs 6 beers in one evening counts the same as someone who does 1 shot of tequila.
One shot of tequila and one bottle of beer have roughly the same alcohol content (give or take) … so the one who’s consuming six times as much is the same? That’s … weird logic.
Previous person was comparing volume. So the 6 beers would be way more than one shot. My suggestion was to eliminate that noise from the data.
That makes even less sense, then. He says “counts the same as”. Six beers is not the same as one shot by any metric: volume, mass, alcohol content, nothing.
They are the same in regard to number of people. Each is one person counting for alcohol consumption.
People need to take responsibility for their actions. Education is all thats needed and let people make their own choices. If they ruin their own lives, that’s on them.
Less drugs should be illegal as a adult you shouldn’t be told what to do and what not as long as you don’t harm others.
This is elementry thinking. Banning ___ cause its bad does not work.
