Some of the things I found really interesting within this paper...<p>1) They hypothesize that alcohol's legality vs. the illegality of other equally or less harmful drugs is a result of efficiency: we only need one drug, agreed upon by social norms, with roughly the same rate of effect (or predictability of effect, accounting for weight) on everyone, for the purpose of 'social lubrication' / 'signaling our true selves via willing loss of control'.<p>2) They talk about how knowledge of the effects of a drug is key to choosing how much to consume for desired signalling, and pretty much provide a perfect mathematical model for the horror that is college freshman drinking with older students.<p>3) Their references are pretty cool. e.g.:<p>Nutt, D., L. A. King,W. Saulsbury, and C. Blakemore (2007): "Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse," The Lancet 369(9566):1047 - 1053. -- This paper apparently provides a scientific basis for ranking the harm of different drugs.