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Like most legal things, nobody has thought, or had the time, to make it illegal. It is such a part of modern life that even if it were found to be dangerous, it would be hard to pass a law to ban it.

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13y ago
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13y ago

Good question. Very often which drugs are legal and illegal comes down to arbitrary historical reasons. Opium, for example, was made illegal here in Canada because white people didn't like Chinese immigrants taking their jobs in the West, so they made opium (a drug most commonly used by the Chinese at the time) illegal. By criminalizing this population it served the interests of certain people at the time. Cannabis and heroin were also popular among black populations so those were naturally criminalized. In Britain, gin was made illegal because it was popular amongst the poor, whereas beer and whiskey were the more aristocratic choices, and thus were acceptable and legal.

Since the time when various drugs were made illegal, their illegality has been reinforced by variations of Reefer Madness (i.e. trumped up tales about these drugs to make them seem more dangerous than they are). The Nixon and Reagan War on Drugs only served to reinforce the arbitrary division between legal and illegal drugs to the point where we don't even refer to alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine as drugs.

Alcohol was illegal for a time in North America, but everyone eventually realized how stupid it is to put drugs into the hands of organized criminals to get rich off of.

So to get back to your original question, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are legal because they were popular and socially acceptable at a key point in history.

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12y ago

yes it is. Its not always good for you but its legal.

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10y ago

It is completely legal in most parts of the world, at least when enjoyed in its natural forms.

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6y ago

It is legal

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13y ago

ummm.... no

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