Cocaine really isn’t very harmful to your body. Fifteen minutes of a mild euphoric stimulant and then you’re sober. It’s not particularly addictive either. It just has a weird reputation as a “hard” drug from movies and people that believe them.

It’s the upper-class drug of choice, and there’s a reason for that. It’s also probably the most expensive drug by dollar-per-high-minutes, which is the real reason it should be avoided

Cardio toxicity cannot be ignored, especially in the typical context of consuming cocaine- dehydration, high amount of physical activity and sleep deprivation.

Any stimulant is potentially harmful, especially one as powerful as this. Even ephedrine, which is considered relatively mild, is actually dangerous.

And that's if you don't consider risks that are inherent to the drug's price- cocaine is expensive and thus frequently isn't too pure, to say the least. Pretty obvious how it affects its side-effect profile

Cocaine when mixed with Ethanol (which is fairly common) creates Cocaethylene which is quite cardiotoxic and apparently increases risk of sudden death by 18-25x.

Obviously millions of people still do it and get away with it (otherwise England would be much less populated) but strictly speaking Amphetamine is probably safer for uppers.

> It’s not particularly addictive either

Cocaine is highly addictive though.

> Well, obviously, far more people drink alcohol than use those two.

But saying alcohol is the most dangerous drug with this definition is still fair enough to say right? Carfentanil is more potent than fentanyl, but fentanyl is on the streets so it's what we should crack down on.

Per capita, alcohol kills more people than any other drug in most countries. It's also one of two drugs where you can die from withdrawals, being more dangerous than crack or heroin to detox from. It's also the only drug you get advertised 24/7, and that is socially forced down your throat (literally).

Not to say alcohol isn't fun, but it is the most dangerous drug to society, statistically.

>But saying alcohol is the most dangerous drug with this definition is still fair enough to say right?

This is conflating the difference between "danger" and "harm". Danger is a measure of risk, not damage.

You wouldnt say that drinking alcohol is more dangerous than drinking bleach or sulfuric acid, but it can be more harmful, if you are talking about rates.

> Per capita

Is this a good metric? For a potential drug consumer it is more relevant which health/social risk is involved if taking a certain drug once/sometimes/regularly.

Alcohol causes 5.3% of deaths globally. While at an individual level alcohol is only unhealthy on average, as a society its impact is pretty significant. While some drugs are definitely worse at an individual level, access and criminality should mean they're less of an issue. If we're going by purely individual risk not taking into account other factors then 14-Methoxymetopon is 10,000 times stronger than fentanyl.

The issue is the misleading presentation of it. The writer of the linked blogpost is either dishonest or already missing what you're saying.

>Next time someone tries to justify drinking alcohol, remember it causes cancer and other diseases, it’s three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco

I know people don't understand cumulative effect, and you know they don't understand per capita. It's just a dishonest way to present something. You could say it's fair that driving is more harmful than drunk driving, but that'd be misleading at best.

Sure you're right, but the conversation that heroin is more likely to kill you than alcohol is (or should be) obvious. However people don't seem to realise 3x more Americans die per year from alcohol overdoses than opioid overdoes or that it is the cause of 5.3% of deaths globally per year. Parents rarely buy their developing kids heroin to take to a party, and you rarely go out after work with your boss to see who can do the more lines of cocaine.

You're more likely to know someone who dies from alcohol than any other drug, if you don't already. And I say that as someone who lost a friend to heroin! So I get how bad it can be, and I get how fun alcohol can be, and how culturally accepted one is over the other, but damn alcohol is a deadly drug. Like I said in another comment, alcohol is one of two drugs you can die from withdrawals from too (the other being benzos, ironically what you get to help deal with alcohol withdrawal).

And I say this knowing I still fancy a beer after work! Because that's how ingrained this stuff is in our lives.

I would argue soda is a lot more impactful than alcohol if we talking about cumulative deaths, financial cost, or quality adjusted lives lost.

The reality is that there is many ways to compare the characteristics of different substances. There are long-term impacts, short-term impacts, ld50, moral impacts, dose control, chemical addiction potential, chemical addiction rate, Etc.

You have to understand all of these to make sense of why different chemicals might be considered differently.

Like it or not, When compared to a lot of drugs alcohol has a high ld50, High dose control, and low chemical addiction rate.

You are unlikely to OD on a drink because the dose was high and there is too much alcohol in it. You are unlikely to get chemical withdrawal and cravings from infrequent use.

This puts a lot more control in the hands of users which is an important moral and Regulatory consideration.

Utilitarian analysis of total death or cost to a very bad job of taking into account any of the moral considerations

No, tobacco products kill a lot more people, in the U.S. about 400,000 people a year--three to four times as many as alcohol.

Do we have actual data for this other then the usually wrong common sense derived from our cultural values?

Most drugs are relatively harmless if taken rarely and in relatively low doses, the problem is that a lot of users don't and that because of our shared cultural history Alcohol typically gets a pass where as things not alcohol is vilified even if the data(as is the case for Cannabis) suggest that they might be more equal in actual harm done.

It's pretty funny that they just came up with a ranking system of their own criteria and we're expected to take it seriously as if it were a real study. They also rank cocaine and weed about the same at 27 and 20 danger points respectively, both of which are more bad than steroids at 9 points.