>It is a distinction stemming from real world practice. You wont fail a drug test at work and be fired due to alcohol. You wont get shunned and kicked out thanksgiving for having a glass of wine.
it doesn't really work like that in practice though - there are plenty of 'drugs' that won't ruin your life or social-status, and they're not all listed separately like alcohol.
I'm a firm believer that the reason the linguistics that we now use came about was due to the legalities of the substances involved and the market action. Alcohol is big business, and legal -- so it deserves a distinction. That's about the singular distinction. The market was allowed to push phrases into the public purview, and luckily for them the phrases stuck.
During western prohibition it (alcohol) was called 'poison' or 'narcotic', or 'intoxicant' in the propaganda.
The google ngrams viewer verifies this suspicion; the phrase ' drugs and alcohol ' wasn't in (real) use until much later in American history.[0]
it doesn't really work like that in practice though - there are plenty of 'drugs' that won't ruin your life or social-status, and they're not all listed separately like alcohol.
I'm a firm believer that the reason the linguistics that we now use came about was due to the legalities of the substances involved and the market action. Alcohol is big business, and legal -- so it deserves a distinction. That's about the singular distinction. The market was allowed to push phrases into the public purview, and luckily for them the phrases stuck.
During western prohibition it (alcohol) was called 'poison' or 'narcotic', or 'intoxicant' in the propaganda.
The google ngrams viewer verifies this suspicion; the phrase ' drugs and alcohol ' wasn't in (real) use until much later in American history.[0]
[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=drugs+and+alco...