That is a question best asked of politicians and legislators. The reasons for legalizing one harmful, addictive and behavior altering substance while criminalizing another are completely based in social policy and accepted norms. These policies and norms are in turn influenced by other factors, like: medical research, social research, baseline cultural morality, perceived or real social costs and plain old politicking.
Some street drugs are genuinely more harmful, both in physical tolls and social costs, than others. But there are other illegal drugs, most notably marijuana, that walk that fine line of equally harmful yet still socially stigmatized. Activists in favor of legalizing, or at least decriminalizing marijuana, point to the many well-controlled medical studies that show marijuana to be no more, and possibly less harmful, than alcohol or tobacco. They assert that while the harm factor is basically the same, marijuana, unlike its legal counterparts, has real and documented value to people with painful critical illnesses like cancer, MS and glaucoma.
These arguments are not wrong but miss the point that we have several controlled substances that are used in medicine but that are not permitted for recreational use. This is because the medical studies only support use in ill individuals and not in otherwise healthy people. In critically ill people the harm is outweighed by the benefits, in healthy people that argument does not hold true. The popular “club drug” Vicadin, which is a legally prescribed medication, is a good example of a substance with real medical value that still has no place being used for purely recreational reasons.
This brings us back to the heart of the question, why are alcohol and tobacco deemed “OK” when they are clearly as harmful as some illegal street drugs? The answer is simple, because they are legal and because their place in our culture is firmly established and accepted as a norm, although an increasingly politically incorrect norm. For teens, this question is really moot since alcohol, tobacco and street drugs are NOT legal for use among people in this age group. There are minimum drinking ages and in North America they range from 18 – 21 depending on where you live. The same holds true for cigarettes, which are not for legal sale to minors, as defined by the laws where you live but which is usually under 19. Since even the legal substances cannot be legally used by teens there is little validity in teens using the argument that alcohol and tobacco are as harmful as street drugs to justify using such drugs.
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