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alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively

This is so relative and variable, it's impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.

Like, is alcohol "fine" compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don't know if "fine" is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn't mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn't doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.

And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person's over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren't going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.

Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn't mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at "fault" either. But it's a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person's health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.