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.
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
>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.