One of the great difficulties in making sensible drug policy is the “drug” isn’t a very sensible category: the differences among the (abusable) drugs are as great as the similarities, and alcohol, considered a drug by pharmacologists, is not usually so reckoned in public discourse, making it easy for people to say silly, nastly things about “drug users” over their beer.
A reader asks a good question, to which I don’t know the answer:
How much money has been spent (picking some convenient epoch) – government money, donated media money, private foundation money, etc. – on building negative associations for the word ‘drug’?
If you know the answer to that question, or would be willing to do the work to find the answer, please let me know.