> If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be?

Perhaps that's true for your definition of "better off", which is perfectly fine, but it isn't universal. Even though I don't do drugs, I don't think it should be anyone's business to police what other people do with their minds and their bodies on their own time, as long as they don't pose a threat to anyone else.

You haven't really thought this through.

One, those substances are fine for a lot of people.

Two, some of those substances are fine for most anybody. I've never even heard of a deadly marijuana overdose, and the evidence shows no increase in mortality for marijuana users.

Three, we already tried alcohol prohibition, and we are currently trying drug prohibition. It does not solve he problem you care about, while creating other large problems.

So really, you sound like somebody who has a personal hobbyhorse and uses pretty much anything (like say, losing stars on GitHub or mentioning a book on airplane safety investigations) to argue for it. And that sort of motivated reasoning around argument for societal change strikes me as way more dangerous than somebody eating a THC edible.

I'm scared to see what your sanitized world would look like. Some of the most interesting art, music, and personal perspective has come from the consumption of the substances you deride as unnecessary and destructive.

How much art, science and deep, personal perspectives were lost due to abuse and death stemming from substance abuse? In case of certain substances (like alcohol) we have rather hard statistics about it's overal impact on physical and mental condition of society. Slow change from alcohol to safer alternatives (ex. cannabis) is probably one of the best trends in current times.

How many lives were saved or changed for the 'better' through the escape of, enjoyment of or numbing with drugs and alcohol? Who knows?

Perhaps if we think more like adults instead of infants we can try to understand complex issues better instead of reinforcing black and white stereotypes of the world or rehashing whatever our favourite source of ignorance tells us.

I think that do-gooders who have a "Great New Idea" for how to make society better are 1000x more dangerous than any type of drug ever invented. People drunk on alcohol mostly fall asleep harmlessly. People drunk on power and how awesome their own ideas are launch prison-industrial complexes, dystopian enforcement schemes, wars, genocides, etc.

It may be an even worse drug. People on drugs mostly have some awareness that their ideas aren't very good. But for those drunk on power, the fact that their same great idea has already been tried and led to total disaster is no cause for concern at all. You see, they're obviously smarter and better than the last batch of power-addicts who tried that, so they'll do it right this time. Heaven help us if we ever discovered a chemical intoxicant that was capable of making people that deluded.

An interesting thought experiment - how many of us would be here at all if not for alcohol? Ignoring butterfly effect aspects, the number of people who were only conceived due to decisions made under the influence of drugs would surely be very large even today, let alone prior to the availability of birth control.