Alcohol is the most harmful drug out there[1] - worse than heroin, crack cocaine, and all the rest. It boggles my mind how common it is, while genuinely useful drugs like psilocybin are still Schedule I and relegated to the shadows.
What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine. Now I guess you can define harmful in many ways and I didn't read the study and probably won't.
The correct phrasing is, "Alcohol is the worst drug to be addicted to". Slightly different from OP, it just removes morality from the issue.
I definitely understand your apprehension to this idea, however, someone I know very intimately is an alcoholic. They've said this phrase to me before and it wasn't clear until they explained their position from their perspective:
There is no other drug that is as socially accepted and harmfully addictive as alcohol. Keep in mind that you can die from alcohol withdrawals and even without dying you might wish you had. The same drug that can do that is stocked on shelves, easily accessible, advertised on TV, and passed out for free at times. Additionally, addiction to alcohol is cyclical. Many people drink out of anxiety, that anxiety is cured while drunk until the person begins to sober up. Then the alcohol fuels more anxiety which continues the cycle.
This phrase isn't meant to discount the experience of other addicts but moreso to express the unique difficulty that alcoholics may experience in the world.
> And the National Drug Intelligence Center reports, “an estimated 6,222,000 U.S. residents aged 12 and older used crack at least once in their lifetime.” A lot of people have used crack, and a lot of those people do not fit the stereotypes about who uses or why.
There are all kinds of people in this world, and we all live very different lives.
What’s your point? A lot of people have tried crack and there are a lot of crack addicts. I calculated the numbers of Australia a few years ago. Something like 10% of people who try heroin become dependent. That number is like 0.1% or 0.01% for alcohol.
You are comparing people that used crack at least once in their lifetime with people who drink reasonable amounts of alcohol for decades. Then this comparison became basis for comparing effect of crack on people with the effect of alcohol in people. This is disingenuous.
I'm not sure that's the comparison that's being made. At least the phrasing suggests they think it's more ongoing than "at least once".
> If you're looking for people who use crack recreationally
That seems to suggest something more similar to consuming "reasonable amounts" for an extended period. I personally don't know how common that would be (since I don't tend to hang around kitchens in restaurants) but it does sound rather different from "people that used crack at least once in their lifetime".
Was about to say, I can see how one can try making a claim that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis l or even cocaine.
But crack and especially heroin (fentanyl would go here as well)? That instantly made me lose any belief in credibility of that reply, sadly. Anyone who has seen what those drugs end up doing to literally everyone who starts using them, it's not even close. And that's despite the fact that heavy alcoholism absolutely can churn out some extremely awful scenarios where people turn into monsters.
It's like hearing someone tell you with full-on seriousness that bicycles going at their typical speeds (15-20mph) colliding with pedestrians will cause more physical damage to pedestrians than a pickup truck going at its typical speed (45mph+).
That's more to do with the legal and cultural status of cocaine than its chemical properties. Illicit drug users tend to have difficulties to begin with, and the legal and financial consequences of using illegal drugs tend to worsen them. Also, crack tends to be cheaper than freebase, so a specific comparison is also being confounded by socioeconomic disparity.
> What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine.
I don't know any numbers, but I do know there are people who consume crack recreationally and are doing fine. It's hard to compare to alcohol though, since alcohol is much more readily available and easier to get for a large amount of the population.
Alcohol is doing damage at scale vs crack which is doing damage to a much smaller set of individuals. See drunk driving deaths vs crack driving deaths.
It does if you look at it overall vs per capita. If crack was consumed at the scale of alcohol, yeah that’d be a big problem, but I think that’s obvious.
That paper doesn't really say how they computed the scores of the different drugs. Without that information it's hard to say how accurate the scoring is.
[1]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0140-6736(10)61462-6
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