Opiod users are vastly over-represented in all sort of statistics - addiction treatments, overdose deaths etc as compared with alcohol.
6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think. Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's called desoxyn, and can be prescribed for ADHD or weight loss.
Also chirality-flipped meth is available over the counter as a nasal decongestant
all the shows I've ever seen on it suggests it is pretty life destroying though.
but what harm per dose? May be the harm is high, but there's so few users that nothing shows up in aggregate.
None of them, except maybe some prescription pills like benzos, take control away from me the way alcohol does.
None of them have had me wake up in some random place with no idea how I got there. None of them have made me do things I don't remember, none of them have made me do and say things I regret.
Alcohol has caused all of that and more. The only reason I still drink alcohol is because it's the only socially acceptable drug. I'd much rather do coke or molly, to me those feel significantly safer than alcohol. And they're better, and they don't ruin the next day to the same degree alcohol does, at least not in my experience.
And yes, alcohol absolutely can make people undress and walk out into a busy street. It can also make people aggressive. One time my father came home shitfaced, furious at me for no apparent reason, punched a hole in my bedroom window, came into my room and started screaming at me while bleeding everywhere from punching the glass, then grabbed me by the neck and started choking. I can't remember how it played put after that but I ended up spending the night at my aunt's place. The next day he was in shambles, he would never do anything like that sober. And for the next few years until I moved out, I was anxious every time he went out.
I still do illegal drugs. Not very frequently, I'm a regular guy who works a decent job, is dependable etc. I'm not going to work high or anything like that. Just like most people don't get drunk at work. I know many people with similar lifestyles. I'd bet the majority of illegal drug users are just like me, they have their fun in a responsible way and live normal lives. Just like with alcohol the really messed up addicts are the exception, not the norm.
Go to a psytrance festival and see for yourself. I've been to many and I haven't seen people running around naked. If anything, I feel safer there than on many large events where people drink.
I'm really sorry about your loss. Situations like that are awful. I think it's really important for people interested in psychedelics to try them in a safe environment with people who have experience with the given drug and are willing to stay sober and keep an eye out. Every time I've encountered psychedelics (hundreds of occasions) it's been in situations like this, and they prevent tragedies.
Those of us who are arguing for legalization are basically arguing for society to create these kinds of safety nets writ large. Rather than counting on having a wookie friend nearby you can straight up call up 411 or something before doing a drug. I know it sounds ridiculous but if people are going to do these things anyway... I mean we're happy to have society teach eachother how to have sex safely, why not drugs? And that includes alcohol.
The equivalent to that are towns that forbid the sale of marijuana in states that legalized it. It's still legal to use and possess.
In general, many behaviours influence the chance of bad things happening. Eg getting behind the wheels of a car in the first place increases the chance of vehicular manslaughter (compared to walking).
Society can punish the probabilistically bad behaviour, or the bad outcome or any combination of the two (including none).
If the punishment is purely financial, and enforcement is certain and actors have deep pockets, it doesn't really matter which combination you pick.
You can emulate the deep pockets by requiring people to get insurance. Even if the law only polices the bad outcomes, a rational insurance company might want to police its customers behaviour. (Eg your health insurance gives you a discount, if you show them evidence of healthy habits. That's equivalent to charging people who fail to provide that evidence more, but the discount is more PR friendly.)
Both driving at all and drunk driving increase the chance of a person committing vehicular manslaughter. Societies largely allow driving, but ban drunk driving.
Drunk driving is dangerous, mainly because drunkards have slower reaction times and are more prone to taking risks. The more alcohol you have in your blood, the harsher the fines and punishment. But we typically don't check people's sober reaction times and risk appetite, and charge them more for driving sober.
It's all about trade-offs.
In the case of vehicular accidents, most people don't necessarily have deep pockets, and the damage of injuring or killing people can't be undone by paying money. However we eg still let old people drive, and only do something about them when they actually get involved in an accident.
This is fundamentally nothing to do with economic trade-offs: it's about generally disincentivizing risk-taking when in command of a multi-ton vehicle moving at speed.
We can know this because even if a "bad" driver is objectively more risky than a professional race-car driver who is 20yo, but has drunk a beer; it's the latter that's committing a crime when they drive.
People didn’t pick 0.08 BAC and then lower it because they found 0.08 BAC wasn’t low enough, instead the same organizations kept pushing for ever lower limits so they keep dropping independent of any actual impact.
Nobody advocates for drunk drivers as a group so there’s no equilibrium reached, just ever harsher penalties and lower limits. I don’t drink, but it’s obvious that using literally 0 as your threshold will pointlessly waste money going after edge cases unrelated to drinking.