And another Scalzi post:

Rich’s earlier comment that alcohol is safer than marijuana is fairly well falsified by research. Alcohol is *damned* dangerous and really wallops the human body. But it was easy for pretechnological cultures to produce, so it’s been around for a large chunk of recorded human history. I’ve read some anthropology that posits that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agrarian was largely driven by the need for a stable supply of ingredients for beer — a convenient way of delivering calories that won’t succumb to mold or most pests.

Meanwhile, John’s comment about recreational use sort of misses the point — the self-medicating crowd, by and large, thinks that they are recreational. It turns out that quite a lot of what we generally consider to be moral failings — a tendency to chemical addiction, for example — is actually more akin to undiagnosed disorders.

I was a heavy drinker in college, and then stopped the day I finished grad school. Wasn’t hard at all, I’m just not wired for alcoholism. But just as I don’t think I deserve credit for giving it up, I don’t necessarily think others deserve blame for it.

Likewise, the idea that you’re somehow a moral failure for being unproductive because you spend your life baked — well, that buys into the whole Protestant work ethic a lot more than I think is necessary. I figure anyone in ownership of a brain has the right to decide how that brain should function, with the usual libertarian line being drawn where it starts to hurt others.