Earlier quoted context omitted.
Listing the three most addictive, dependency-inducing and mortally dangerous substances used by humans to temporarily achieve a stress-free mental state doesn’t mean cannabis belongs in the same neighborhood.
Simply denying regulatory authority over an intoxicant, as proposed by the devil’s advocate argument I replied to, is obviously incorrect: all intoxicants are intoxicating and intoxication carries a risk of addiction. Where to set regulatory hurdles versus illegalities is much less obvious, and worth considering, but it’s never ‘fully unregulated’ in a prosocial society; if one provides a substance of altered mind, t…
Many ”intoxicants” are inherently not addictive and may even help getting rid of other addictions (ayahuasca / DMT / other psychedelics).
Many things are not ”intoxicants” yet are addictive.
Addiction is a feature of human physiology. More specifically, FosB turning into delta-FosB seems to be the generic marker of any type of addiction, and it directly drives addictive behaviors when overexpressed in the prefrontal cortex.
The physiology is a result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation, and while it must have correlated with evolutionary fitness at some point(s) and in some scenario(s), modern humans are surrounded by so many novel stimuli and ways of self-stimulation that we simply have not yet had the time to physiologically adapt to the situation where some of our addictions are not actually conferring true increases in our evolutionary fitness.