Alcohol is cheap and can be bought in a store from normal people. Drugs demand time and money to actually obtain them, and they are often sold by dangerous people (in dangerous places). As your time, money and safety are violated (over time) by drugs, the quality of your life goes down and you have more of a desire to keep self-medicating. When your society shuns you, this desire grows even more.
People live normal lives on Rx morphine or methamphetamine all around us, just like a lot of alcoholics function. It is very hard to compare a legal drug with an illegal one in terms of addiction (which has physical and psychological components, the latter made worse by the conditions around the drug).
This was going to be my argument. Most of the problems associated with heroin use for example is due to availability. If people had access to heroin like they do for alcohol then they would be functioning addicts just like there are many functioning alcoholics.
Why do I consider alcohol a 'hard drug?'
You can die from the withdrawals, and it is very toxic, having negative affects on various parts of the body and mind. Opioids are fairly safe when taken in known doses, and don't have much of a negative affect on the body other than constipation.
You can't say that somebody isn't addicted to alcohol when they are drinking moderately throughout the week, and then maybe go harder on the weekends. That's basically how most heroin users would be if it were available like that, and that's how they are in places where it is available like that. They go to the clinic during the week and then go on with their lives after they dose, then probably have some extra fun a few days a week.
Also, alcohol is somewhat self limiting due to how hard of a drug it is. People are functioning alcoholics because it's such a hard drug that they can't abuse it daily without the negative affects becoming too damaging to allow them to continue drinking without it really becoming a problem.
So my argument is that given the same cost and availability, 'hard drug' users would be functioning just fine in society, just like those who are enrolled in clinics and get a daily dose at an affordable rate. Also as RedLeader pointed out, there are functioning users of these drugs in people that have prescriptions for them, and have their own private stash of the drugs without having to go out of their way to obtain it, so nobody knows about their use.
It's often said that the problem with hard drugs is not the drug itself, but obtaining the drug. Most heroin addicts only run into problems when they cannot safely obtain the drug at low cost, so then may have to do illegal things to obtain the drug, which itself is illegal.
When I was homeless the majority of the other homeless people were alcoholics, so that drug was by far the most commonly used. These people stole to get the drug, and would have horrible withdrawal symptoms if they couldn't get it. Then when they could get it, they would get belligerent and cause all sorts of disturbances and problems to the left of me, making their habit seem a lot worse than the heroin addict to the right of me that would peacefully be nodding out and/or talking nicely and being social while under the influence.
I know that my post was kind of all over the place, but the main point is that given the same availability, alcohol users would appear to be worse off than most opiate users at least. Meth and crack users show why those drugs are considered hard though, but put a person on a 3 day binge of alcohol next to a person on a 3 day binge of meth and they will be acting just as crazy as one another.
I'm going to move this thread to drug culture.
OD --> DC
