[coldtea]

>We have a legalised and fairly sane alcohol policy in most countries, we can hardly hope to have a better policy and set up for any other drug, and yet alcohol is still a devastating blight on many lives

You don't just need to have a "sane policy".

You need to have a sane culture.

For one, a culture that doesn't treat alcohol as something necessary for having fun (e.g binge drinking on weekends, etc), but as something social you can have while eating with friends, etc.

Second, a culture (society) that doesn't cripple people, produce mass stress and depression, etc so that they take it to alcohol and drugs.

As long as you don't have those, there will always be people taking it to alcoholism. Heck, even with those you'll still have some people (but much less). But then again people can destroy themselves in 200 other ways too, if they are so inclined (from over- and under-eating to straight suicide).

[lifeisstillgood]

Yes policy is not the right word, but we have many cultures around drinking alcohol, and sayin that some of them are the wrong culture and this the cause of trouble is either just labelling those of that culture as "troublemakers" which just leads downwards, or a more enlightened question is why are those cultures toxic - which tends to lead back to mental illness, depravation, lack of opportunity and lack of ... A culture that values more ...

And we are back again. Humans are a problem.

[untothebreach]

Couldn't agree with this more. It seems that too often we look to policy to solve problems that really need to be addressed at a lower level. The problem with that is that changing the law is easy, when compared with changing the culture.

[lukifer]

I'm reminded of the story of Rat Park: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

[innguest]

I thought I was the only one that knew about that study. I use it often when arguing that the word 'addiction' is biased and we should just use 'habit'. Addiction makes it seem it's the substance's fault, that it has something that makes people addicted to it, when in fact it is people that sometimes have a predisposition to forming habits when taking certain substances.

Crazy people can't buy guns, but guns aren't illegal for everyone. It should be the same for drugs, at least. If you have this predisposition to habit forming around drugs then you can't have them, but most of us don't.