> GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects.
> (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.
you can buy malt liquor at gas stations in several US states. at least they warn you not to drink it on your way home!
in all seriousness, I really doubt the type of person who buys random "supplements" from a gas station to get high is going to be deterred by a scary warning label.
You also need serious abuse with alcohol to get to a point where you are spending every paychecks on booze and become non-functioning like the people that are described in the article. Alcohol addiction does not happen over a week.
Finally it all comes down to the ratio of casual users vs addicted users. Millions (perhaps billions) of people drink alcohol and a fraction have serious addiction issues with it. Same goes for caffeine. They are not comparable.
as for the rest, it reads much like the rest of the sensationalism typically heard when the general public funds out about a new drug of abuse for the first time. if you wanted to write a piece like this, I doubt it would be hard to find a handful of people who became severely addicted to alcohol from the first sip.
and I suspect you will want to split hairs with me on what exactly "casual vs addicted" means, but the figures I can easily find suggest that opioids have a similar addiction risk versus alcohol. it's hard to find a good denominator for casual opioid users, but this [0] study puts the rate of addiction among PM patients around 10%. meanwhile, about 10% of Americans over 12 years old develop alcoholism [1]. not quite an apples to apples comparison, but the raw "addictiveness" is likely within the same ballpark.
[0] https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/2015/04000/Rates_of_o...
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/
If you look at the label in the picture, this is terrifying stuff that is marketed as a dietary supplement while causing enough symptoms that people are going to detox over it. Even if it's half or a tenth as bad as heroin, that's way too much considering how it's marketed.