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Because people don't want them banned, and because the negative effects are, for most of the population, controllable.

>Why haven’t they been banned for the sake of the population?

The effects of alcohol and tobacco on the overall population basically amounts to a rounding error.

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Many times different governments around world tried to ban them. More often than not it was making production and sell of them one of the top income sources of criminals. It is usually less harmful for society to have them legal with lots of tax to make them less accessible than to ban them and have wealthy and powerful gangsters.

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The alcohol and tobacco industries spend a lot of money on political lobbying. That means they donate tons and tons of money to politicians, to make sure they never ban those products.

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Alcohol in moderation can actually be good for you. I do mean moderation though. And the world would not be the way it is today without beer.

Tobacco on the other hand, I just don’t get. There are no health benefits. It’s purposely filled with shit that does even more harm to you, and it’s made to be addictive. The fact that the government makes a fuckload of taxes from it should not be an issue. That’s like saying a criminal should be allowed to keep robbing banks because they rely on the income. And when you consider the strain the diseases from smoking put on the healthcare system, surely there’s some kind of trade off.

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The effects of tobacco are relatively isolated to those who use it. Granted it does raise overall costs for healthcare. But in the US, we often control second hand effects by regulating, heavily, where you can smoke (at least in public, and at the local/state levels).

Alcohol, is generally only dangerous when overused/abused. The poison is in the dose, not the substance. So we do criminalize and regulate how you can interact in public while under the influence. You can’t drive or operate machinery because those are the primary ways that alcohol will affect someone else.

But in general aside from community effects, we tend to think that people are responsible for their own individual health. Granted we do criminalize and ban other drugs that tend to be more addictive and dangerous. But I think that’s simply because tobacco and alcohol are just old and are institutions (at least in “western” cultures). There’s just not enough will to fully ban them.

Body autonomy. People have a certain right to make decisions about their bodies. Those decisions shouldn’t put others at risk (hence drinking and driving laws, smoking with children in the car, etc). It’s not a perfect system by any means and I think we could generally do a lot better but we should also protect peoples freedom to make choices about their own bodies.

It should be the government's job to make impacts well known and control access a little bit. 12 year old should not have the access.

The same applies to sex education. Educate, but don't restrict.

Support your last sentence.

Alcohol use causes about 140,000 deaths each year in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html#:~:text=More%20than%20140%2C000%20people%20die,in%20the%20U.S.%20each%20year.

Cigarettes cause 480,000 deaths in the US each year. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm#:~:text=Cigarettes%20and%20Death,-Cigarette%20smoking%20causes&text=More%20than%20480%2C000%20deaths%20annually,including%20deaths%20from%20secondhand%20smoke)

Over 600,000 deaths a year is far more than a rounding error.

Because banning anything only creates a black market for it, which drives up the "bad" thing's price and violence associated with it.

It's not the government's job to protect you from stabbing yourself in the eyeball with a fork.

I hardly drink or smoke anymore, but every once in a while when I do, who are you to tell me I can't?

The government did its job by labeling it as being harmful, that's good enough.

My body, my choice.

“Approx. 13% of adults in the US smoke cigarettes. Most prevalent cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the US.”

For the tobacco piece, the strongest argument I've heard in favour of keeping it legal is to avoid the creation of a black market.

I don't know about other countries, but at least in Australia where the tobacco tax is super high there is now a growing market for black market tobacco, with all the criminality and safety concerns that go along with other illicit drug trafficking activities, and that's without outright banning the stuff.

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Couldn’t that logic apply to other harmful substances though? Meth. Cocaine. Heroin. There’s a black market for all of those.

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It’s far from being the sole role of a government. And I wouldn’t be able to confidently say that teens and younger are fully aware of all of the physiological mechanisms and consequences of alcohol and tobacco consumption and addiction.

I’m coming from a place of curiosity as I generally do; can you elaborate on beer contributing to the world being the way it is today?

Indeed. Water was notoriously unhealthy in many parts of the world, causing severe illness and death. But beer requires boiling the water first, removing said bacteria. It also contributed to creative and inventive thinking. The pyramids, math, modern agriculture, factories, all from beer. There’s a Discovery TV series called How Beer Saved The World that I highly recommend.

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That said, there's a pretty substantial amount of regular people who also legitimately want to enjoy such things, regardless of whether or not those companies lobby the government. It's not just some top-down conspiracy.