Good question. If you were to go by relative effects on consciousness, alcohol is a far harder drug than cannabis. Lots of illegal drugs are, alcohol is much worse than we believe.
it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.
But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.
I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.
A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.
When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.
Good question. If you were to go by relative effects on consciousness, alcohol is a far harder drug than cannabis. Lots of illegal drugs are, alcohol is much worse than we believe.
it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.
But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.
I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.
A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.
When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.