Great. Let’s ban alcohol and sugar too. I am totally fine with taking the idea of something being harmful to society and it being banned. Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs. But it’s subsidization should stop.
> Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs.
Sugar is both legal to possess and readily available at very low cost. No one needs to rob people to afford it.
Sugar can be problematic, but those rat studies are quite contrived. They follow an intermittent fasting schedule where rats don't have access to any food for 12 straight hours of each day and then they are presented with the option for unlimited sugar drink for a period, with this cycle repeated for weeks to get the reported results. If the rats have 24/7 access to the sugar drink they don't develop all these addict-like behaviors. Such research can be mechanistically interesting for biologists but I don't think it says much about how we ought to assess human behavior in practice.
Here is a review article discussing in more detail relevant literature on evidence for/against sugar addiction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/
Certainly questions remain, but I think it's pretty clear sugar and cocaine are not actually in the same stratosphere here.
There's no doubt that there are dimensions along which sugar and cocaine are different, but your conclusion is unsubstantiated, IMO. The paper's conclusion is much more restrained:
> Given the lack of evidence supporting it, we argue against a premature incorporation of sugar addiction into the scientific literature and public policy recommendations.
Lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack. Most of the arguments the review makes are that a mechanistic link between sugar/fat consumption and addictice eating behavior has not been substantiated by the literature. The review does not argue that such a link is impossible or improbable, nor does it argue that addictive eating behavior is in a different stratosphere from addictive drug use behavior.
