Yes, this is the important point. Functioning civilization depends on people being mostly rational most of the time. If using certain drugs both induces irrational, destructive behavior, and also induces you to continue taking the drug, society can't really tolerate it. The only reason we can tolerate alcohol is that only a relatively small percentage of users become both destructive and addicted.
Secondly, there are all sorts of drugs, some addicting, some not addicting, some legal in some places, some illegal in other places, some making people "irrational", some making them more "rational". There's no correllation between these attributes.
Legality depends on historical accidents more than anything. Alcohol is in fact one of the more addicting drugs out there, see the high percentage of "functioning alcoholics" out there.
That's why I said mostly rational. Out of the thousands of little decisions and behaviors we engage with in a given day, most are rationally chosen to move us towards our goal. Most are basically habit, of course, not some long, drawn-out process. But, still rational.
> There's no correllation between these attributes.
Oh, I'm not arguing that current drug policy is great and sensible. I think it should be liberalized. I just don't think a total free-for-all is a great idea either. Ideally we'd set the status of a drug -- recreationally legal vs medicinally legal vs decriminalized vs illegal -- based on its societal harm, rather than whatever ad hoc method we use right now.
