The other major difference between alcohol and nicotine is that nicotine mostly harms the user, but alcohol often harms all those around the user. People don’t usually crash their cars, or beat their children, or miss work, because they’re smoking. But they do do all of those things when drunk.
Fomepizole is a far superior treatment for methanol poisoning than ethanol.
I couldn’t find a cite to satisfy my curiosity on that.
I don’t doubt that marijuana can be habit-forming, maybe even addictive. But everyone I’ve ever known who was labeled a marijuana addict was a small-time user who was being coerced to quit by someone else who disapproved of the habit… a family member, caregiver, employer, what have you.
Or they had a panoply of mental issues and decided that “marijuana addiction” was the first thing they needed to work on. (Not an unreasonable strategy, since going sober is a more clear-cut goal than tackling depression, and could be helpful in that effort. But it doesn’t mean the substance itself caused their problems).
I think it would be legal, especially if it was discovered today when people are moving against prohibitions. If marijuana is legal (in Canada and some states), then why not alcohol? Don’t drive while high on pot, don’t drive while drunk. I suspect over time, some illegal recreational drugs will become legal (such as many psychedelics), but I doubt heroin or cocaine will ever become legal due to the higher risk of addiction.
Alcohol is problematic because it’s used by so many people. If only a small percentage become alcoholics, the raw numbers will still be high. Most of my friends drink alcohol. They don’t drive drunk, though to be fair (living in a large city) most don’t drive at all. Only one appears to be an alcoholic. Sometimes (pre-pandemic) we go to a bar, most of my friends may have a beer or two, and I don’t have any (since I never drink alcohol) - none of them get angry at me (they’re not political about drinking) and I don’t tell them off for drinking (because only a jerk would do that when other people are responsibly using alcohol). I’m buying food and soft drinks, so the bar owner doesn’t care that I’m taking up space there either.
Two of my close family members are alcoholics, and one might be, so I’ve seen it wreck lives. However I don’t see this like heroin or cocaine addiction where the risks are far higher.
I recall reading a study from the 1990s (so obviously very much out of date) tracking AIDS in New York City. They were specifically looking at illegal needle-using drug consumption. Up to 4% of the population in some areas of NYC were using illegal drugs.
Apparently the modern rate is higher, according to this source:
Acquired tastes are still tastes. If people didn’t like the taste of alcoholic beverages, and were just drinking for the drug effect, they’d drink the cheapest or most convenient alternatives, and not spend money on expensive wine or whiskey.
If I like a drug that tastes bad, then I’ll pay more for the least-offensive form of it. And people do. Go to a liquor store and gaze at the endless variety of things that nobody would ever touch if it didn’t have booze in it.
If even the least-offensive version still offends my palate, but I still love the drug, then I might convince myself that my taste for it is not gustatory, but cultural.
You say this beverage that tastes like rotten grain and burnt moss? Well, I’m sophisticated enough to know better, and that sophistication helps me choke it down. It sat in a barrel for 20 years! That means someone loved it, and I probably should too! It costs a hundred bucks! That means I’m way fancier than the rubes who can’t choke it down.
(Full disclosure, I’m a former alcoholic, so I have been through the full cycle of programming and deprogramming w/r/t alcohol propaganda. I have spoken it and I have believed it, and I ultimately learned to reject it when I realized it was killing me. It’s just so much bullshit.)
Surely, the least offensive form of alcohol would be vodka mixed with a sufficient amount of sugar. That’s way cheaper than fine wine or aged scotch.
And wines taste at least similar to unfermented juice, which many people like. It won’t be as sweet, of course, but then, most folks prefer juice to plain sugar water, so apparently the non-sweet components of juice flavor (which wine has) are also desirable.
It should be noted that, contra ThudlowBoink’s suggestion that the existence of fine wine means alcohol’s appeal is taste-driven, the vast majority of alcohol consumption is the cheapest combination of sugar and additives that make the drug tolerable. Plus the social rituals that entwine a sense of companionship and belonging with the experience of drinking.
Experiments have been demonstrated showing that wine-tasting is largely bullshit. Without the benefit of labeling and marketing, most people (including professional wine tasters) can’t tell the difference between a rare Bordeaux and a bottle of two-buck-Chuck from Trader Joe’s.
Much of the pleasure emanates from the bottle’s label and consumption rituals, not the flavor of the drink. That’s exactly the dynamic you’d expect from someone rationalizing a drug habit.
If alcohol somehow evaded widespread discovery until recently… say like bath salts, I’d say it would be classified dangerous/illegal. All sorts of nasty substances can be used by a trained professional to safely help people (warfarin (rat poison) as a blood thinner, botulism (Botox) to smooth out wrinkles), but it’s so easy to overdose on alcohol and suffer all kinds of bad responses.
As pointed out though, it’s unrealistic to ever imagine alcohol not being discovered tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago… the ingredients are everywhere and it will literally make it’s self under the right conditions.
The tradtion and culture surrounding alcohol must account for 99+% of the reason we tolerate it. It’s so ingrained into society that it’s one of those substances where people who don’t partake in it are often looked at strangely. I didn’t drink at all when I was in college. Probably 60-70% of people thought I was very strange because of it. Only a small percentage didn’t care. And if you tell people you don’t drink anymore, most tend to think that you had a problem and/or were some sort of addict. If you used to play tennis, or be a baker, that’s cool! You used to drink?.. ooooh, what happened? 
It indeed does, and, since I’ve cut way back on sugar in the last decade or so, undiluted, and even diluted, grape juice tastes way too sweet and tart to me. I think taste-wise only, what would taste best to me would probably be a mix of a fruity wine such as Beaujolais with around 25% grape juice, but somehow remove all the alcohol from the final product.
Alcohol itself tastes bad to me — hence my dislike for vodka. I stopped drinking last year, but found plenty of good to very good non alcoholic IPAs and even Heineken 0.0 that I drink regularly because I do like the tastes of those drinks, high or not. And hop water is pretty awesome. I mean, you can say the flavors became acquired tastes because of the alcohol, but I loved those bitter herbal flavors from when I was a kid with stuff like wormwood tea and quinine water and other herbal, non-alcoholic concoctions.
Incorrect. At least for smoking tobacco - that results in second hand smoke and harm to those around the smoker. Other forms of tobacco, like chewing tobacco, are more harms-user-only.
I said that nicotine mostly harms the user. Yes, secondhand smoke is harmful, but not nearly as harmful as firsthand smoke, nor as
“secondhand drinking”.
It’s pretty apples-and-oranges. Strictly speaking, the alcohol itself doesn’t harm anyone but the user; it’s what the user does under the influence of alcohol that has the potential to harm others. Whereas, tobacco itself has the potential to harm, and certainly to annoy, the other people around the one who’s smoking it, but it doesn’t make the user any more dangerous to other people.
That makes assumptions about people and taste, such as people always going for sweet and “instinctively” avoiding sour and bitter. And that is not universally true - plenty of people like sour, and not just sweet-and-sour or sour-and-salt.
As a kid I’d peel and eat a lemon as if it were an orange and loved vinegar flavors. I loved tea the moment I tried it and bitter vegetables like broccoli. And I really annoyed mom by snitching bits of raw bread dough to eat. I did these things even though people around me expressed discomfort and tried to discourage me. This was before I ever had anything alcoholic and there was no potentially addictive drug element at work.
So was it really a surprise that I definitely liked wine and beer the very first time I tried them? Not that I like all forms of alcohol - there are some types of single malt, for example, that taste like you’re drinking a swamp fire and I don’t find that pleasant at all. And I didn’t taste pure ethanol the first time (I can’t imagine that would taste good) nor did I taste a distilled liquor until much later in life. Yes, ethanol is bitter/aversive but in beer and wine it’s a small part of the overall flavor. You might as well say oranges are an acquired taste because pure citric acid is unpleasant and oranges contain citric acid. Sure they do, but that’s only a small part. All citrus have a sour note (some more, some less) that makes up part of the citrus flavor, but we don’t say oranges are an acquired taste. Grapefruit seems to be… but that’s another one I liked from the first moment I tasted it.
Not that I’ve ever had a compulsion to seek out these fermented flavors, or the alcohol that goes with them - there have been years I’ve gone without drinking alcohol at all and didn’t miss it (I was preoccupied by airplanes, which I enjoy much more than a good drink). I’m a pretty lightweight drinker these days, infrequent and with rare exception not more than one serving in a day when I do drink.
For people with alcoholism the drug might be a big factor with its reward factor but that’s not universal. I’m not an alcoholic though I do like that taste - but I very much do NOT like getting drunk. More than a mild buzz and it becomes unpleasant to me, long before what most people would consider drunk (I probably haven’t met the legal definition of drunk in years, if not decades).
I do get annoyed when what happens with alcoholics gets extrapolated to non-alcoholics. My liking of alcoholic drinks have never compelled me to keep drinking. For other mind-altering substances I do believe the same applies - there are many people who can casually use marijuana without it ever impairing their ability to be responsible adults. There are other people who, even if not meeting strict definitions of “addicted”, do have a problem with over-use that can manifest as failure to live up to responsibilities or spending more than they can afford on weed with other bills going unpaid or likewise showing indications that they are having a problem and ideally should stop using said substance. Which is easier said than done.
Beer and wine have been around so long, and are so easy to make at home, that I can’t see any practical way to actually outlaw them and make them stick. Distilled liquor is more problematic. Likewise, chewing coca leaf in the Andes doesn’t seem to have been a major social disruptor but refining it into pure cocaine sure seems to be a problem.
While there have always been individuals that have a problem with mind-altering substances problems increase as the potency goes up. Things common in the human environment, like fruit and juices, honey, seed pastes (raw bread dough and its cousins), and the like can naturally ferment and tolerance for certain levels of the resulting alcohol can lead people to eat slightly fermented items and continue to get nutrition/benefit from them instead of throwing out useful food or drink, and in some times and places mildly alcoholic beer and wine were safer to drink than the water. Tolerance for alcohol in the past had some benefits, even if there could be problems. For that matter, fermented stuff like pickles and yogurt can likewise preserve foods for long-term storage and tolerance for the resulting flavors can also be of benefit - but drinking nothing but pickle brine will kill you faster than ocean water, and pure lactic acid I’m sure isn’t good for you, either.
What I’m coming to in this rambling discourse is that certain low levels of toxic or pharmaceutically active substances might well have had some advantages for our ancestors, leading us to counter-intuitively enjoy sour and bitter flavors, sensations that usually warn off us foods but in low amounts, combined with other things, can have benefits. So there’s a market for broccoli, sour candies, and kimchi as well as beer and wine. The bigger problems come with concentration of active ingredients. Cocaine is much more of a problematic substance than coca tea, as an example. Gin was more destructive than beer when it was introduced. Occasional ceremonial use of tobacco was one thing, breeding ever more nicotine into tobacco and altering processing resulting in cigarettes made it much more addictive and sickening to its users. Rinse and repeat for a lot of things, including putting refined sugar into every damned commercially processed food in every increasing amounts. That’s not good for us, either, and even has some addiction-like effects on people.
Or, looked at another way, the appeal (at least for social drinkers) is not the pure drug but its presence in low amounts mixed with other things. I’ve known alcoholics that drink pure or nearly pure alcohol, but social drinkers (let’s define that for this conversation as “people who are not having negative effects from their occasional alcohol consumption”) do not. As noted, they drink things like beer and wine where the alcohol “note” is pretty minor. We don’t eat pure spices in 100% concentration, either - we put a little bit of nutmeg in baked goods, not heaps of it. Attempting to eat pure cinnamon doesn’t end well, either, as demonstrated by that stupid “cinnamon challenge” a few years back, but it’s widely enjoyed in small amounts. It’s when a person is driven to consume stronger and stronger drinks with a higher percentage of alcohol, or consume large quantities of low-alcohol drinks in a short time period, that use becomes problematic regardless of the reason - alcoholism, peer pressure, whatever - that practice emerges.
That I agree with - while there are some truly terrible wines and beers (I assume improperly made or with strains of yeast that are less than suitable leading to repulsive flavors, or something else going wrong) beyond a certain point marketing and rarity are what separates high-dollar wines from “two buck chuck” (actually, these days my wine purchases hover around $7-10 a bottle). You know what? Same applies to diamonds, at least the gem variety. Industrial diamonds are relatively cheap which is why diamond bit drills and grinding wheels are easily available to the average person on a budget but its marketing (and some false scarcity, thanks De Beers) that drives the cost of white diamonds as high as they are.
You could say something similar about things like hot pepper eating contests. I’m not sure you could argue they’re battling a capsicum addiction, though. Social and cultural rituals involving some discomfort but still pursued are also a thing, and complicates any discussion where they are involved. They are certainly a factor in many addictions, but not limited to addictions. Alcoholics might attend wine-tastings, but I don’t think it follows that everyone who goes to a wine tasting is an alcoholic or on the brink of being one, or rationalizing a drug habit. Or even has a drug habit.
Alas, my allergy to barley has put those non-alcoholic beers off limits to me. Which is a shame, because I like those flavors. So far, while I have found beer-like beverages that do not contain barley (usually based on sorghum) I have not found a non-alcoholic version of them. So I have simply given up on beer, because there’s no flavor that’s worth getting sick to me.
Slight hijack :
which I did myself when I stashed a 2-liter bottle of Hawaiian punch (which was about 10-20 percent fruit juice at the time ) in a closet around memorial day by the time I took it out around July it was fizzy and tasted strange turns out it was about 45 proof and I was supposed to dump it out according to the CSR I was talking to , as a 15-year old I did not … it was sort of like drinking boones farm … and a pleasant buzz
Typically the maximum proof one can reach by yeast fermentation is 18% (36 proof) as higher concentrations kill the yeast.
hey i was “about” right 
tho I forgot to mention it it was unopened …
It is certainly possible to be addicted to pot. I knew (and collaborated with) a brilliant (not a word a use lightly) mathematician whose entire career went down the tubes from his use. The first thing he did in the morning was smoke a toke. Then he used it constantly all day. I knew him when he was finishing grad school and we wrote two important papers together; those papers were really the foundation of my career. But his basically disappeared and he eventually succumbed to heart problems from the tobacco that went with the pot and then mental problems ensued and he died nearly 20 years ago.
But I have known at least three alcoholics and, yes, I think if alcohol were a new discovery it would have been made illegal. But prohibition worked so well…
I would point out that you do not need to be addicted to the drug, or dependent on it, to have it shape your tastes and habits. Alcohol is (among other things) a dopamine agonist. To oversimplify, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that reinforces behavior, it tells your body agnostically that whatever you just did (or saw) was a really good idea, and you should do it again. This is how we learn behaviors that don’t serve our direct needs, but rather indirect.
If you’ve ever mastered a video game, it doesn’t mean you’re a gaming addict. Nonetheless, the game did train you to do a bunch of meaningless non-instinctual tasks to get a jolt of dopamine. Alcohol also produces a dopamine response, and it trains you to do the non-instinctual thing of seeking out rotten liquefied foodstuffs.
This is demonstrated abundantly by the fact that, although there is a market for liquefied rotten food that does not contain alcohol, it is dwarfed by the revenue for rotten food that does does contain the alcohol. The global market for nonalcoholic beer is about $15 billion, which is utterly dwarfed by the $611 billion for alcoholic beer.
Though surely there are a few people who just like the bitterness of hops, the market unmistakably reflects that it’s about the alcohol. It’s not to say they’re all alcoholics or that all alcohol consumers routinely get drunk. Just to point out the abundantly obvious fact that whatever factors people confabulate for why they drink, it’s overwhelmingly about the drug-seeking experience.