Alcohol And Other Drugs

Alcohol is a drug, for a drug is a substance that affects a person on a phenomenological or physiological level.  Yes, so does food, but drugs are used for medicinal or pleasure-seeking purposes outside of the more basic survival and nutritional purposes of food; drugs are only used for survival in atypical situations when applicable, such as when a life-saving medicine is administered.  They can be psychotropic just as alcohol is: they can alter mental states, and not just in the way that any drink like water or substance like dough can make a person experience specific tastes or scents.  All of these things can bring particular mental states as well.  The difference is that they, unlike some drugs, do not trigger something like a state of drunkenness.

One might hear alcohol and drugs separated linguistically despite the plain overlap.  It can be much more difficult to linguistically define drugs than some might think, for they might only appeal to authority or think of a drug as something that really overlaps with what they think of as a separate category--for instance, as aforementioned, drugs impact the mind and/or body, but so does food, and yet food is very different from something like marijuana or hard drugs like cocaine.  At the same time, they have more in common than might be initially believed.  Alcohol is indeed often referred to alongside other drugs by a different word as if wholly distinct, but it genuinely is a drug in the looser sense.

Just because it is a liquid does not mean alcohol is not intoxicating or otherwise capable of affecting the mind and body.  Many people are familiar with its correlation to phenomena like potential drunkenness.  However, there is a widespread attitude that accepts alcohol use as something refined or even positive under the right conditions, in public or in private, that can be abused but does not have to be; at the same time, there is a double standard that also characterizes use of other drugs like marijuana as inherently addictive, destructive, and an indicator of hedonistic or depraved worldviews or behavior.  As if drugs cannot be used to varying extents like alcohol and as if all drugs have the same effects, alcohol and other drugs can be regarded very differently for purely irrationalistic reasons.

Language can only influence your worldview if you allow it to, and one can always look past words and whatever errors they might express to reason and concepts themselves.  Still, the way that people might mention "drugs and alcohol" instead of "alcohol and other drugs" could contribute to a misperception that not everyone examines free of assumptions.  Someone certainly could use the terms alcohol and drugs more in line with the societal norm in modern America without believing anything contradictory or assumed, yes.  Word choice alone does not have to mean someone believes in fallacies and misunderstands the nature of concepts.

I myself have used the words in this way here on my blog (though I have pointed out the double standard precisely because alcohol and drugs are just different examples of the same overarching category of mind-altering substances)!  The way that the masses use the words in differing ways nonetheless could suggest on its own that alcohol being a specific class of drug is not acknowledged.  Given the double standard between how alcohol and other drugs are regarded in plenty of cases, which would only be embraced if many people did falsely think the one is not just a subset of the other, it is true that the relative acceptance of one and the demonization of the "other" means some people would believe things that cannot be true.