Of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.

One thing that has always baffled me is how certain things have come to become part of socially accepted culture, while others that fall into categories that are conversely socially repelled and looked down upon.

Like in the title of this post, for example – it is immediately evident that all of these are addictive objects with chemical components that increases a human’s reliance on them. Alcohol induces the sense of euphoria, cigarettes gives a smokers’ high, but so does marijuana, hashish, heroin, and opium, to name a few, that raises a human’s sensitivity to decreased perception – which means you actually feel more for things that you actually think less about, and that’s quite a problem.

The weird thing is that society actually goes about classifying these drugs by their public usability – drinking and smoking are the most open forms of public drug consumption, and they no doubt are addictive, we have enough anecdotal and scientific evidence to support that. Other forms of drug consumption are however best left to the private sphere, treading thinly inside legal systems, as people smuggle them across borders to satisfy these needs for chemically-induced euphoria. The drug market is lucrative, too, enough for a death sentence to be meted for possession of a mere few grams, enough for people to risk this death sentence for the potential income that they may receive.

Then the greater question is, how does society actually go about classifying these drugs by their public usability? What is the criteria that they work with? Saying something like, but drinking has historically been a means of socialization, is quite inadequate, because at that point in history, there must have been some other reason that this was accepted as a means of socialization as well, and then the question repeats itself.

So society today accepts drinking and smoking as acceptable, though many may frown on smokers because they can directly affect the air around you, but nobody – or no government, really – goes all out to condemn these people who drink or smoke, or imposes a ban on these products (which is really simple, actually), or any other form of extremist-like legislation.

What is the rationale behind this? How did socially acceptable come about? Who defined it?

And, by extension, if we could classify alcohol and cigarettes as drugs, then why aren’t we disallowing them? Why do we continue to allow products with significant negative externalities and potential negative externalities to be sold as part of the private market?

It’s usually not my style to do this – but this post probably ends here, with more questions than answers that can be provided. Game theory may provide a reasoning – the optimal outcome may be a worldwide ban on substances classified as “drugs” (that includes cigarettes and alcohol), but nobody actually ever chooses the optimal outcome, they only choose the equilibrium, which is to produce some amounts of these cigarettes and alcohol to satisfy the markets’ demands. Yet game theory revolves around the rationality assumption of humans, and so the production of cigarettes and alcohol would be Economically rational – just perhaps morally irrational.

But come on, it’s Economics, it’s equilibrium. Who was to say that equilibrium was fair in the first place?