Not to mention high-risk activities like driving a car, downhill skiing, skydiving, or scuba diving (or various "extreme sports") which are perfectly legal but can easily kill you, cause brain damage, paralysis, and sometimes inflict the same or worse on some innocent victim.

Few if any people will heap extreme moral outrage on people who engage in such risky activities, but if someone dares light up a joint or god forbid consume some other illegal drug, they're a dirty druggie who should be thrown to rot in jail, where (if they don't get killed outright during the raid on their home) they are likely to suffer rape, torture, or other human rights abuses. On top of that they face having their home and other possessions confiscated and a felony keep them from getting good jobs for the rest of their life once they're released (if they manage to survive jail).

Can you even imagine anyone suggesting such a fate for someone who merely chose to drive a car or ski?

The sun also helps your skin produce anti-cancer compounds, and the obsessive use of sunglasses and high-SPF sunscreens may have the opposite result.

Everything is bad for you with a vengeance.

> Semantically, everything is bad for you. Fruits are high in sugar, the sun gives you cancer.

Generally life is bad for you, because all life ends at some point.

There's a pretty intuitive difference between moonshine and a banana.

But not between a joint and a twinkie, or 20oz soda, or a deep fried <anything>.

I'm not sure. Anything that has psychoactive effects seems like it would be in a league of its own (caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, LSD, etc.).

It's not intuitively obvious that acetaminophen has a startlingly small therapeutic window, especially when combined with alcohol. It's not intuitively obvious that alcohol may reduce all-cause mortality in a hormesis-like fashion, with low chronic consumption reducing risk but high chronic consumption increasing it. Pharmacology == intuition goes out the window.