Question

According to the standard definition, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and crack are all drugs. Is it reasonable for some of them to be legal and others to be illegal? Why?

Answer 1

Ans)

There are big drawbacks to looking at drugs exclusively through these blunt measures. Alcohol, tobacco, and prescription painkillers are likely deadlier than other drugs because they are legal, so comparing their aggregate effects to illegal drugs is difficult. Some drugs are very harmful to individuals, but they're so rarely used that they may not be a major public health threat. A few drugs are enormously dangerous in the short-term but not the long-term (heroin), or vice versa (tobacco). And looking at deaths or other harms caused by certain drugs doesn't always account for substances, such as prescription medications, that are often mixed with others, making them more deadly or harmful than they would be alone.

For these reasons, it's nearly impossible to come up with an exact measure of a substance's harm. So I talked to drug experts about the reasons people take drugs (legal and illegal ones) and the risks behind them. Although experts generally agree that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, there was a lot of nuance in how they took on the issue — and there is enormous variation within what makes pot, alcohol, and other drugs dangerous. Here's a breakdown of what experts said about some of the most widely used drugs.

- Marijuana has never reportedly caused an overdose death, but that doesn't mean it's harmless.

"The main risk of cannabis is losing control of your cannabis intake. That's going to have consequences in terms of the amount of time you spend not fully functional. When that's hours per day times years, that's bad.

- At some level, we know that spending more than half of your waking hours intoxicated for years and years on end is not increasing the likelihood that you'll win a Pulitzer Prize or discover the cure for cancer."

The risk of abuse is compounded by the widespread perception that pot is harmless: since many marijuana users believe what they're doing won't hurt them, they feel much more comfortable falling into a habit of constantly using the drug.