There needs to be some means for people who cannot-otherwise reach, to experience/release, emotion, to do-so.

Multiple times in my life it is the only method that has worked to reach some emotion ( pain, recently grief ), that is too locked-out for me to experience otherwise.

It, itself, isn't inherently-bad or inherently-good, it is inherently costly, in-that it wears-down a person's health, and it enables ( due to the way it's culturally-identified/used ) much harm, but anybody who's read about the difference between binge-culture ( some anglo-Celt cultures, just look for a bar with the word "Arms" in its name ) vs the French-style have-a-glass-with-our-meal style, and the difference in assaults, etc, it becomes stinkingly obvious that it's a cultural-thing, not just alcohol-itself that is the problem.

There is research on criminality as an outlet, a means of blowing-off-steam.

1 item in that research was on prison-culture, and how you had to allow the inmates to have some slack, XOR your "tightening-the-screws" on them forced them, predictably as clockwork, into rioting.

I hadn't understood that.

The problem is human-nature.

Human-nature requires the ability to "break the rules", to some degree, so therefore responsible government's obligation becomes .. making it so that the breaking-the-rules causes as little harm as possible.

I'd outright criminalize alcohol & marijuana before age 21, because of the road-slaughter than under-21 drivers do while having alcohol in 'em, and because of the amplification-of-psychosis that marijuana does to any forming-brain, and the hell-cost of the amplified schizophrenia resultant from that.

However, I'd have SacredHelper, aka Peyote, legal, if treated with care.

Not as a street drug, but as a means of asking another-dimension-of-mind for a lesson in one's growing-up.

So, it is both the objective-harm/cost and it is the relationship/process that matters, to me, based on the evidence.

Just an opinion, tho.