Alcohol and cigarette consumption are leading causes of chronic illness and hospitalisation, and there are links to cancer but people don't want to hear about it. Most people seem to think it's normal to binge drink, or drink to excess on a regular basis. The drinking culture in Australia shocks many foreign visitors from European nations.
I'm not arguing that unregulated drugs are necessarily better, but I AM saying that we already have extremely corrosive drug use that's regarded as legitimate. The distinction that people like to emphasise about supposedly illegal therefore bad, legal therefore good, is overplayed and lacks depth and detail.
And you're right: many opiate drug users started their dependency on prescription drugs, built up a tolerance, and were unable to secure supply, so branched out into heroin and similar. This can happen to anyone, as documentaries repeatedly show.
I stay well away of most drugs except in extreme situations ( eg. I once had nerve damage and had to take some prescription drugs). But I know how easy it is to develop a drug habit, and never have. Some people are simply genetically more vulnerable to addiction. As a society we should treat drug abuse as a social problem. The war on drugs is farcical, and has simply failed.
