Your entire response is plainly untrue and it is just a demonisation of alcohol and a promotion of meth, crack and heroine.
I really wished that certain comments that tend to minimise the effect of the most dangerous drugs were prohibited here.
But apparently it is full of people that enjoy that shit and absurdly try to convince other people that a glass of wine is worse than a spade.
His response comes with a citation. So I'd say there are plenty of people here who enjoy science and the Economist's reporting.
Without data, any opinion of this subject is bound to be based entirely on society's collective opinion or individual anecdotes. Within those limits, I'd argue that "people that enjoy that shit" are actually more reliable.
I believe the partition made by the the post you're replying to gets pretty close to my anecdotal reality. I'm somewhat convinced that heroin/crack/meth are addictive and that alone will always scare me off. Whereas LSD/mushrooms/ecstasy have almost no potential for addiction.
And, yes, having experienced them tends to make you run around telling people that it's part of the human experience – much like I'd tell people that they'd miss something essential if they never got slightly drunk on white wine watching the sunset on a beach.
But the citation doesn't support his post. Overall it cites the researchers as listing alcohol causing less mean physical harm than heroin and cocaine, less acute physical harm than both, and almost as much chronic physical harm as heroin (both rated higher than cocaine). The only category it rates alcohol the highest in is social harm caused by intoxication.
edit: I may be looking at a different study (I can't read that economist link). I'm referring to "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs," though I do see another study "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis" that corroborates his post.
