You might be surprised that alcohol is not a low-risk drug by some measures

i am aware of that. i am using alcohol simply as a baseline. any other substance must not pose any higher risk. ideally less even.

Note that MDMA and LSD are considered considerably less dangerous than alcohol here

i was not aware of that, but i guess the realization of this is why more and more places are considering making such drugs legal.

I don't want anyone to feel they should be legalised because banning them won't work

i was mainly talking about alcohol here. since alcohol is very easy to make, all that banning gets you is moonshine.

The example of the woman with brain damage, or my mate with a broken back, these very definitely have a high cost to society

i disagree with that. sure, it costs insurance, and taxes, but noone else got hurt. if as a society we can't bear that cost then we'd have to ban almost all outdoor activities because they all carry some risk of injury. the result would be a very oppressive society. the cost that i worry about is the personal tragedy that results from being an innocent victim. horseriding does not cause bystanders to get hurt. motorcycles rarely do, but drugs and alcohol do, as do cars and guns (and gambling).

I don't know if we can ban alcohol on an individual's rather than societal level

that won't work simply because by the time the relevant institutions to make that judgement are able to intervene the damage is already done. we need solutions that prevent the abuse from the beginning. only education and restricting access for anyone can do that.

> but that doesn't mean that legalizing drugs is the best answer to these problems, but it's unfortunately probably the cheapest.

That is not an argument I would support for legalising drugs

neither would i. but the alternative is to increase investment into education and healthcare ten-fold or more even. which is something i would absolutely support and prefer over allowing the use of drugs for self-medication. but that is much harder to achive. i am fighting for that though, whereas i am not fighting for drugs to be legalized. i merely allow that to happen by not fighting against it either.

> project and teach people that alcohol and gambling are bad? absolutely.

I'm not comfortable with that statement, they are not inherently bad. They most certainly can be bad, but they are not automatically bad

well this is another point where we are going disagree, which is fine. basically i believe that using substances to alter your state of mind is a bad idea and should only be done under medical supervision and when necessary. (but again, i don't want to make a law out of this, unless it is necessary to protect innocent victims). but this is a whole topic of its own that i am not quite ready to argue here because i am not familiar enough with the details.

It does feel that you're a little more lenient on one activity because it doesn't involve drugs, and less so for the other because it does.

i am more lenient on some activities because they are supported by the current consensus in society. if it were up to me, i'd eliminate any alcohol, smoking, gambling, private cars and guns from this planet. because they are all dangerous to bystanders and there are better ways to handle the problems they solve.

ultimately, no matter what choice we make, what matters is that as a society we will only make progress if we find consensus on the major issues that we face today. because only through consensus are we able to change direction if we find that some choice was a bad idea.

we are struggling with a lot of issues because we waste energy on fighting each other instead of looking forward.