Imagine if smoking a crack rock was an acceptable social function after thousands of years of existence and there were millions of casual crack smokers throughout the country. Alcohol is not the same as other drugs, it's socially ingrained in human society and you can't separate that while still having an intelligent conversation. Shouting 'hypocrisy' is not intelligent conversation.
Alcohol is still a drug, exactly the same as every other drug. It affects your brain, it gets you "high," and it has terrible side effects like addiction. I don't see how "this is just how things are" is a very good argument either. Alcohol has a relationship with humans because of how it is made: literally just fruit and grains that have gone bad. If another drug was as easy to make and available to every human society on Earth, then it would have become part of our culture too. Weed is different because it only existed in China for most of it's history, and with a very low-THC content, requiring you to smoke a lot of it to get any kind of pleasurable high. Opium came close, derivatives are still used as medicine (morphine), but it also comes from a specific region meaning it isn't a part of global culture. It is absolutely hypocrisy that we celebrate alcohol consumption but ban something as relatively harmless as marijuana. Society just doesn't want to admit it was wrong yet, but it will.
It's such an intellectually lazy argument and it's a common one. It doesn't add anything to the discussion of drug reform and it ignores the reasons that alcohol is a huge part of society. Starting from a point of "This is how things are" allows you to explain why that shouldn't be the case instead of the equivalent of pointing at a kid in the cafeteria and whining that he has two ice creams and you don't have any.
OK, that's just like, your opinion, man. It's a common argument because it's a good argument. It absolutely adds something to the discussion, because it shows how our acceptance of alcohol is just a fluke of chemistry. Did I not explain why it was a huge part of society? It's easy to make, every human society has access to it, it's fun, and it allows you to be social. Other drugs are fun and let you be social too, they just haven't been as accessible as alcohol. It is ignorant and hypocritical to celebrate alcohol consumption while frowning upon the recreational use of other, safer drugs like marijuana. I can't figure what the point is you're trying to make here. Maybe you want to rewrite it?it ignores the reasons that alcohol is a huge part of society.
Starting from a point of "This is how things are" allows you to explain why that shouldn't be the case instead of the equivalent of pointing at a kid in the cafeteria and whining that he has two ice creams and you don't have any.
So hang on.. Are you guys arguing about what's a good argument for legalizing marijuana or what's a good argument for banning alcohol? Because the original article could go either way. And that's important here because the article makes a far better argument for legalizing marijuana than it does for banning alcohol. And if you two are thinking about different conclusions that could be drawn, that might be an unseen disagreement going on here.
So it's an argument from tradition? We have legal alcohol and illegal marijuana because history, therefore the present state of affairs is defensible? If pointing out an inconsistency risen from historical circumstances is so childish, then I guess that would make Women's Suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Marriage Equality movement all "grade school arguments over what's fair" as well.
I think the problem is that he wasn't necessarily defending it because of its traditional value. I think what he was trying to get across is that it is a relevant part of the issue, and one that was completely ignored by the article. I don't think it was pro-alcohol or anything, but a criticism of the argument itself. That was just my interpretation of the argument though, i don't want to be putting words in the tacocat's mouth.
You basically just compared buying a beer to slavery. You are part of the reason I don't talk about drugs on the Internet. I'm glad you're clever enough to find a rhetoric flaw with a statement by someone who probably agrees with you but I will continue to dread an orange hubwheel today.
Sorry, no. It's actually like I compared buying a beer to civil rights. What I did was illustrate the absurdity of your argument by applying it to a well-known situation that everybody has come to agree on. I did not alter the form of your argument. Perhaps I should illustrate more clearly? I just took alcohol and marijuana and replaced them with interracial marriage and gay marriage. That's it. I did not suggest that buying a beer is bad like slavery, so we should make it illegal along with marijuana.I'm arguing that you can't compare interracial marriage being legal to anything else being illegal (e.g. gay marriage) without ignoring why it's legal and generally oversimplifying your point to the level of a grade school argument over what's fair
Alcohol is ingrained in dominant western culture, not all human society though. I don't think it's the easiest drug to come by in nature and has tons of detrimental side effects. Believe me, I get why alcohol is so central to us; it's part and parcel of the New Testament after all, but that still doesn't make its place in our society logical when you compare its harmful effects.Alcohol is not the same as other drugs, it's socially ingrained in human society and you can't separate that while still having an intelligent conversation.
I don't usually talk about drugs on the internet because I don't like talking with people on the internet who want to talk about drugs. And for this one instance, talking about this in real life is even worse. Being high and unable to tell someone to shut up or politely leave is really boring. On one hand I totally agree that pot is safe and not as harmful as alcohol, on the other hand, this argument is pushed to such a ridiculous extreme with people who really like getting high that they seem to think overwhelmingly that it doesn't impair their ability to maneuver a one ton box of steel, glass and manslaughter because they drive slower due to being paranoid. I really never want to see alcohol compared to weed again when there are actual sobering (hehe) facts about the way drug users are treated as criminals. It's not logical, it's hypocritical but that doesn't matter, there are a lot of illogical and hypocritical parts of society, but this argument that alcohol is worse just fills my mind with all the stoners I've known and got high with who make the same joke that no one gets high and hits their wife. The kind of people who care enough about drugs being legal to spout off about it are usually the kind of people who hinder that cause. No one else cares as much as you, we can buy a six pack. Try advocating for non violent offenders. Don't wake and bake a couple times a week. Alcoholics who get drunk in the morning get rejected by their families. The equivalent of wake and bake for alcohol is crippling dependence. All of you refocus your attention, it's not the same thing.
Sorry, I just don't think I'm following your argument, and if you don't want to talk about drugs, that's fine, I don't want to to goad you into a discussion you wanted to avoid in the first place. You did make a flippant top comment here and I assumed otherwise, so I apologize for responding.
Dude, even animals get drunk. 2 It's just fermented fruit. Wherever there's fruit, and not all of it's been picked, you get alcohol. It's the easiest drug to come by in nature that I can think of, that humans consume.I don't think it's the easiest drug to come by in nature and has tons of detrimental side effects.
Yeah, alcohol is pretty easy to come by, but so are many psychedelic plants and fungi (just pick and eat if you have the right environmental knowledge). Cocoa leaves grow on trees, and while that's not the same as tacocat's crackrock metaphor, South American cultures have been chewing on them and making tea out of them for thousands of years. Marijuana and opium have been cultivated for a very long time too, picking and smoking them doesn't seem much more difficult than fermenting alcohol.
Eh, my point here was kind of that it's so common even animals, who can't wield fire to smoke drugs, can come across it in nature and consume it. As for the psychedelic plants and fungi, I really think you'd be hard put to find any that grow as widely as the significantly broad category of "fruit," but I don't know enough about those species to really say. True about cocoa, I've actually had cocoa tea - but again, clearly, that's limited to a single continent, whereas fruit isn't.
Yeah, and it's not just fruit, but grains can ferment as well. Alcohol can be made pretty much anywhere. Alcohol certainly is one of the prehistoric intoxicants human society learned to consume thousands of years ago, but it is just one of many other naturally occurring drugs. That was my point, but you're totally right, alcohol is very common in nature.
I'm guessing it came from this study in The Lancet. Under "method," it says:Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.
Does that only measure direct harm, such as hitting your wife in a drunken rage, or does it measure indirect harm as well? Does becoming a financial burden to your family members/the healthcare system or inadvertently spreading blood borne diseases through sharing dirty needles or broken crack pipes count as harm? What about people who steal to support their habits? I ask because there is a huge distinction. Where I live, there is a huge issue with heroin, meth, and crack cocaine and the problems these drugs are causing is widespread and terrifyingly palpable. Not a criticism of you tauta_krypta or a defense of alcohol use, but a serious inquiry into what that graph actually illustrates.
The paper's here. I haven't read it in detail, but it should include the examples you mentioned (harm to the community, economic cost, family adversities and crime are all categories they considered). Clearly it's going to be subjective to some extent, but given that it was published in The Lancet and I've seen it quoted quite a few times, I presume it was reasonably well done.
Hmm. I'm pretty certain if there were as many people used drugs like meth or crack as there are that drink alcohol, we'd be a bit worse off. That said though, the issues that stem from alcohol abuse are still very real and very serious and do need to be addressed.