TL;DR:
- Alcohol $7.8b
- All illicits: $1.8b
- Meth: $0.365b
I wanted a figure for cannabis and found this from 2020:
- All illicits: $1.9b
- Meth: $0.824b
- Cannabis: $0.911
I notice that the per kilograms measure for harm is also useful to account for volume of usage, but think that per ‘dose’ would be better.
- Meth: $1.1m per kg with 743kg consumption
- Cannabis: $0.35m per kg with 58000kg consumption
These figures include ‘associative crime’ as harm. So it apparent counts the cost of buying it as harm, it also counts the tax loss of that expenditure, so IMHO it skews unfavourabley to higher expenditure. But put that aside.
These figures show that all illicit drugs combined are less harmful to society than alcohol, and tautologically the harm is inflated by illegality.
Yeah, the US has known for a long time that alcohol is involved in the vast majority of violent crime. We deal with it by having corrupt politicians write the alcohol laws so that no one is ever very far from lots of booze.
I think tighter regulation’s a good thing.
For a start I would love to prohibit alcohol aimed at kids. In my student days I participated in a lot of market research groups and there were so many groups about late teens taste-testing insanely sweet gross RTD alcohols or discussing which alcohol bottle design was more “fun” “feminine” “flirty” etc.
Good for you guys, hopefully they do something about it because it really is problematic (alcohol certainly ruined my childhood!).
They did try to outlaw it in the US over 100 years ago, right after women got the right to vote. Among other things, part of the rational was women getting beaten by alcohol abusing husbands. Unfortunately it takes a lot more than an amendment to stop something so pervasive though.
Cops wanting more people to arrest.
Just the same as Elon promoting right wingers so he can make more money from defense contracts.
This has been a known thing since the early 2000s, if not earlier.
The general awareness that alcoholics tend to do far more damage to their lives and people around them than potheads do, that goes back a very long time.
Even if we weren’t looking at raw data, common sense and basic powers of observation let us draw solid general conclusions.
Not that I love meth but I suspect if people could buy it in shops and bars the costs would be equivalently high.
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