Why is it that the most addictive substances are also the most dangerous? Shouldn’t those two factors be independent?
In: Chemistry
They are independent as others noted. But there’s another aspect of how dangerous a drug is, which is the difference between effective and lethal dose, and how you get your dose. Caffeine has a pretty low effective dose, while it would be rather difficult to drink enough coffee or energy drinks get a lethal dose. Realistically you’d have to slam a bunch of caffeine pills to overdose. LSD is another, rather low effective dose in micrograms, and the lethal dose is way more than that, very difficult to accidentally overdose.
But things like heroin and fentanyl have lethal doses that aren’t all that much higher than the effective dose, and it’s not hard to accidentally take the lethal dose.
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