[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