Alcohol and fermentation have a much different role with food safety and preservation though; the inebriation is just a pleasant side effect for some (and a curse for others)
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
It's proposed in a Niven-Pournelle novel that grain domesticated humans: we gave it the largest premium territories, we carefully propogated the finest varieties, and we elevated it to a holy sacrament and a symbol of sacrifice, divinity, and unity.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
I can't quit it. When I do, after about 2 weeks I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee and sit in my open plan office,and hide my contempt for the absolute rank ineptitude of almost everyone else there. Load me up with the happy brown juice and I can pretty much make it through. I'm not convinced this is sustainable tbh.
Caffeine improves memory in humans, millions of whom find that their daily dose enhances clarity, focus, and alertness. The human relationship with caffeine is relatively recent, however, and thus its impact on our brains is likely a by-product of its true ecological role. Caffeine occurs naturally in the floral nectar of Coffea and Citrus plants. Wright et al. (p. 1202; see the Perspective by Chittka and Peng) found that caffeine presented at naturalistic levels significantly improved the ability of bees to remember and locate a learned floral scent and potentiated the responses of neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory.
In experiments on bees, researchers have found that once they've had a sip of caffeine-laced nectar, it boosts their memory, makes them preferentially revisit the plants, and even helps them pollinate faster and more efficiently. So, for plants, caffeine is a multi-purpose molecule with a lot of adaptive benefits. But, for us, it has one main benefit: it gets us through Monday morning. ...
That's what's glaringly missing. Nicotine. It's extremely mind-altering, and it's been u-bi-qui-tous in the Americas for millennia - and for centuries in Europe and the world.
Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it
*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.
To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?
Alcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so.
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
So for mold, low enough doses aren't poison? Can't you just say this about anything. If you have poison in a low enough dose it's not poison. So it means jsut about nothing to say alcohol isn't poisonous because you can have a small dose of it.
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.
That's a good definition. Still, you can take it literally - anything small enough doesn't really harm you. and meanings can be stretched to support whatever conclusions you want.
Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs, and I'd say the indiscriminate action and lack of any particular affinity is what makes it a poison as opposed to a drug. It is also generally assumed that alcohol is not exactly in the same category as drugs. ("drugs or alcohol" etc.)
That's purely because it's usage is accepted nearly as a default, and drug in common usage is most often a pejorative term if it doesn't refer to a medicinal context.
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
Don't you mean that it's quite good? It's easily more than an order of magnitude for many people (not sure about chronic alcoholics with high tolerance). How many medications can you 5x your dose and not have some risk of ending up in the hospital?
Well given "therapeutic index" I had said "medication" as opposed to "commonly abused substances". I think your list skews heavily due to psychedelics tending not to be acutely toxic to the same extent as other chemical species.
Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC.
Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
7-Up contained lithium citrate until 1950. The soda jerks were literally treating manic depression during WWII. There were advertising signs for it at crosswalks on city streets. Make 7-Up Yours, Baby!
Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
By the way, Wikipedia attempts to contradict the claim about 7Up containing lithium citrate and says it was never an ingredient. There is no source supporting this claim. An unreliable source, by "Bill Lockhart and Bob Brown" never makes any claim about 7Up's ingredients, but focuses on weirdly-long names that had never been used by the company.
On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!
It’s much more of a poison to some of our primate relatives. iirc the genes that facilitate alcohol metabolism evolved in great apes millions of years before homo sapiens, and we inherited them; we’ve been boozing long before we were even human.
Comments
Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?
Alcohol and fermentation have a much different role with food safety and preservation though; the inebriation is just a pleasant side effect for some (and a curse for others)
Beer may have lead to the domestication of cereal grains. This is not my theory, here's an article about it: https://nautil.us/beer-domesticated-man-234697
Specifically, we have evidence of beer older than we have evidence of cereal domestication. There is evidence that beer's side effects were considered important for social and religious gatherings (as they are today as well). People wanted to make more beer and so figured out how to plant it. The process to make bread is actually a lot more involved than to make beer and porridge... and porridge just doesn't make as much sense as a motivating factor for domestication when the grains ripen at the same time as many many other easier and tastier foods are also ready in the natural environment.
Arguably, the domestication of grain and invention of agriculture played a role in the rise of many civilizations.
There's no reason to think that humans 10k years ago didn't enjoy getting buzzed, just like humans today do.
It's proposed in a Niven-Pournelle novel that grain domesticated humans: we gave it the largest premium territories, we carefully propogated the finest varieties, and we elevated it to a holy sacrament and a symbol of sacrifice, divinity, and unity.
An often missed point about grains is that distilling or fermenting them into beverages made for easier transportation, storage, and resilience. Yeah, you could store grains in granaries nearby, but there is a lot of volume that makes it unwieldy for ox carts or train cars. If farmers can bottle their excess grain, then there is a diversified portfolio that can smooth over crop failures or market dips.
Of course, today the tail is wagging the dog, because liquor production is demanding far more than just the excess harvest or a portion to transport. But you can see historically why its benefits were being touted to the consumer.
Not premium to humans.
yes coffee is reason behind our current civilization
I can't quit it. When I do, after about 2 weeks I completely lose the ability to be a good worker bee and sit in my open plan office,and hide my contempt for the absolute rank ineptitude of almost everyone else there. Load me up with the happy brown juice and I can pretty much make it through. I'm not convinced this is sustainable tbh.
Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1228806
PBS Eons Why Does Caffeine Exist? (5:13 for the bit on bees) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzshAqowsyI
Chesterton called it, quite fittingly, "The Puritan's opium".
And nicotine, don't forget that. Smokers built the modern world (and then developed lung cancer for their troubles).
That's what's glaringly missing. Nicotine. It's extremely mind-altering, and it's been u-bi-qui-tous in the Americas for millennia - and for centuries in Europe and the world.
Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.
To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?
In boxing, you do not talk your opponent through as you knock him out.
In research, pick any field, say, astronomy, you do not mention that Earth is not flat and that the Earth orbits the Sun.
In biochemistry research, you do not spell out that nicotine binds to NICOTINIC acetelcholine receptors as an agonist, that's literally Biochem 101.
Alcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so.
I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
As the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
Tonicity matters too. Deionized water will suck the ions right out of you. All the way to your death if you're so determined.
Depending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though.
That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
I've struggled to tell the difference between doses of LSD that exceed 100µg. Maybe I just take it too frequently to make much of a difference. It's also possible that it only increases duration, but not intensity.
And at the right dosage.
So for mold, low enough doses aren't poison? Can't you just say this about anything. If you have poison in a low enough dose it's not poison. So it means jsut about nothing to say alcohol isn't poisonous because you can have a small dose of it.
Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.
That's a good definition. Still, you can take it literally - anything small enough doesn't really harm you. and meanings can be stretched to support whatever conclusions you want.
What about prions, or strange matter?
You think you can't make those any smaller?
I would assume you can't generally just shrink the size of basic particles, molecular bonds or fundamental forces, but maybe you can, who knows.
Poison is a function of dosage. Water is a poison in a high enough dose.
What’s you’re arguments it’s not a drug?
Alcohol requires an astronomical intake compared to most drugs, and I'd say the indiscriminate action and lack of any particular affinity is what makes it a poison as opposed to a drug. It is also generally assumed that alcohol is not exactly in the same category as drugs. ("drugs or alcohol" etc.)
That's purely because it's usage is accepted nearly as a default, and drug in common usage is most often a pejorative term if it doesn't refer to a medicinal context.
Most people who use drug as a pejorative term also wouldn't use it to describe caffeine.
"drugs or alcohol"
I usually encounter this framing from alcohol drinkers who are trying to be self-righteously judgemental about users of other drugs without getting hit by their own boomerang, so seeing it used for what is essentially the opposite opinion (i.e., that alcohol is worse than other drugs) is quite refreshing.
I still disagree with it, though. Alcohol is clearly a drug.
That's primarily because it's most commonly diluted 90%. Spirits (or everclear) have much lower intake required.
I did not say alcoholic beverages, I said alcohol. Even pure ethanol still requires a far higher dosage than most drugs.
But the "Active dose" to "lethal dose" ratio, aka "therapeutic index" of alcohol is pretty bad.
Don't you mean that it's quite good? It's easily more than an order of magnitude for many people (not sure about chronic alcoholics with high tolerance). How many medications can you 5x your dose and not have some risk of ending up in the hospital?
Heroin (IV) ~6x
GHB ~8x
Ethanol ~10x
Methamphetamine ~10x
DXM ~10x
Cocaine ~15x
MDMA ~16x
Codeine ~20x
Methadone ~20x
Mescaline ~24x
Flunitrazepam ~30x
Ketamine ~40x
Phenobarbital ~50x
Nitrous oxide ~150x
LSD ~1000x
Cannabis/THC ~1000x or greater
Citation: Gable RS. Comparison of acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused psychoactive substances. Addiction. 2004;99(6):686–696. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00744.x
Well given "therapeutic index" I had said "medication" as opposed to "commonly abused substances". I think your list skews heavily due to psychedelics tending not to be acutely toxic to the same extent as other chemical species.
Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC.
Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.
Two things:
1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses.
Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely).
2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls.
https://poisoncenters.org/news-alerts/13244374
7-Up contained lithium citrate until 1950. The soda jerks were literally treating manic depression during WWII. There were advertising signs for it at crosswalks on city streets. Make 7-Up Yours, Baby!
Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.
So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.
By the way, Wikipedia attempts to contradict the claim about 7Up containing lithium citrate and says it was never an ingredient. There is no source supporting this claim. An unreliable source, by "Bill Lockhart and Bob Brown" never makes any claim about 7Up's ingredients, but focuses on weirdly-long names that had never been used by the company.
On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/7up/
https://medium.com/wise-well/lithium-the-nonessential-elemen...
Careful because that's some opioids as well.
It’s much more of a poison to some of our primate relatives. iirc the genes that facilitate alcohol metabolism evolved in great apes millions of years before homo sapiens, and we inherited them; we’ve been boozing long before we were even human.
if alcohol can damage your short term memory,
Imagine what effect alcohol has