[netizen-936824]

You are correct that more exposure would likely lead to more addiction, but consider alcohol. As a society we have developed cultural norms for avoiding addiction such as drinking only in the evenings, weekends, or special occasions. This is only one of many cultural mechanisms we have for regulating drug use, we just need the exposure to develop the mechanisms.

[jeffreyrogers]

Aren't roughly 10% of people alcoholics? And I imagine that percentage is similar across the world, despite widely varying cultures.

Edit: I recall reading somewhere that 25% of people who use heroin develop addictions. Let's say that we are as successful at developing a culture of heroin use as we have been at developing a culture of alcohol use so that we can reduce addiction to 10%. It seems likely to me that any such culture would more than triple the number of people using heroin, so the overall effect is probably to increase the number of addicts.

[DarylZero]

Absolutely not. Alcoholism varies widely between cultures.

[mise_en_place]

Yet many will happily drive extremely drunk or high (or both, as I’m currently seeing where I live as Californians invade). Sometimes societal regulation mechanisms like social pressure are not strong enough. Perhaps we as a society should understand what drives a man to drink until he can barely move, examining shared social traumas that many of us experience.

[plantain]

Culture can and does change, and not on evolutionary timescales but within decades - in Australia drink driving was absolutely rampant in the 60's-80's, but now it's really quite taboo.

"Drink drive, bloody idiot" is a slogan every Australian knows.

[netizen-936824]

We should work to understand what drives use, and we are. Plenty of researchers are working on understanding the physiological underpinnings of the desire to use any given substance.

I personally suspect that over 50% of drug users are attempting to self medicate in some way. Whether or not they are consciously aware that self medication is what they are doing, that's another question entirely.

[mise_en_place]

Your point about self-medication got me thinking. Perhaps we are also at a crossroads in receiving medical care as well. There is an abundance of information available related to medical care that did not exist even 10 years ago. Doctors and mental health professionals can no longer gatekeep critical information, like was tried with ivermectin.

[giantg2]

Yet we see 50k-80k alcohol related deaths each year in the US.

[netizen-936824]

You are correct, but my comment was about mechanisms to avoid addiction. We do need to do something about reducing harm but prohibition is not the answer.

[obstacle1]

Wasn't your argument that increased exposure leads to less harm via developing social regulation mechanisms, though? Using alcohol as an example?

Yet alcohol is by far the most destructive substance in terms of both $ and human life costs. Which seems to weaken the argument significantly...

So maybe prohibition is not the answer. But whatever we've done with alcohol clearly isn't, either.

[hattmall]

Alcohol is the most destructive in aggregate because of its widespread usage though. The destruction per user is far worse on other drugs.

[obstacle1]

I think that's more of an assumption based on social norms than something we can strongly conclude is true. Here is a study that suggests alcohol is one of just four 'high risk' drugs in terms of harm per user, and of those 4 alcohol is the highest-risk. Also alcohol is the highest risk drug at population scale, which we know:

> for individual exposure the four substances alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and heroin fall into the “high risk” category with MOE [margin of exposure] < 10, the rest of the compounds except THC fall into the “risk” category with MOE < 100. On a population scale, only alcohol would fall into the “high risk” category, and cigarette smoking would fall into the “risk” category

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/

[netizen-936824]

Alcohol is very destructive yes, I was just discussing the social mechanisms that reduce the harm