Alcohol, especially in conjunction with acetaminophen or other OTC pain meds, can cause liver damage.
As long as alcohol is a legal substance to consume, it makes no sense to criminalize substances widely shown to have lower harm coefficients than it. There's tons of studies which mostly-objectively quantify harm/addiction caused by substances. The only drugs squarely as bad or worse than alcohol are tobacco products (also legal, contains many more psychoactives beyond nicotine), meth, crack cocaine (delivery route matters), cathinones, GHB, certain gaba-ergics, and most opioids.
Nicotine in isolation, ketamine, classical psychedelics, cannabis, MDMA, most of the Shulginoids (phenethylamines and tryptamines), all fall short of the harm caused by alcohol.
Yeah well we kinda tried that, didn't end well :p. Banning cannabis was much easier due to its much smaller appeal at the time.
The three first principle components of a drug's harm are the therapeutic window (log ratio of LD50 to median active dose), addictivity (harder to quantify, but we have models based on pharmacokinetics and dynamics), and degree of harm to others when altered.
Alcohol is dangerously toxic on the order of ~15-25 units, has fast onset and hits GABA so rather addicting, and as a CNS depressant, is obviously very risky to others.
If a designer analog came out with the profile of EtOH, it'd immediately go to Sch I.
As long as alcohol is a legal substance to consume, it makes no sense to criminalize substances widely shown to have lower harm coefficients than it. There's tons of studies which mostly-objectively quantify harm/addiction caused by substances. The only drugs squarely as bad or worse than alcohol are tobacco products (also legal, contains many more psychoactives beyond nicotine), meth, crack cocaine (delivery route matters), cathinones, GHB, certain gaba-ergics, and most opioids.
Nicotine in isolation, ketamine, classical psychedelics, cannabis, MDMA, most of the Shulginoids (phenethylamines and tryptamines), all fall short of the harm caused by alcohol.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.5921...