Everyone is talking about tradition and racism and everything

But there's one more point to note: alcohol prohibition is much harder to enforce. You can easily make simple alcoholic beverages out of what's already on your kitchen, and it's not that someone will constantly monitor whatcha doin' there (and even if you would, should you take someone accountable for grape juice going funny?)

As a result, home brewing emerges, creating much more dangerous products that are not subject to quality control standards enforced on factories. People still drink alcohol, but this time it gets bundled with a suite of dangerous chemicals produced in an uncontrolled brewing process.

To add to what others have said, white sheriffs in Texas popularized the term Marijuana in the English lexicon, as an intentional strategy to Mexicanize cannabis use, which they thought would cause communism or something.

Dolla dolla bill

One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha

Money.

Because what is legal and not does not involve all that much logic.

As others have already stated, racism and conservative nonsense is the answer.

But I also think drinks are part of food culture in a way other drugs aren't - generally when I have a drink I try to stop well short of intoxication, I want it as part of a meal. And smoking anything is bad for you - my ex wrecked his teeth smoking pot. I do certainly think it should be widely legal, and people always have and always will want mind altering substances, they need to be allowed and the harm managed as medical/social not by prohibition but it's not like pot is absolutely benign even if it is way less likely to produce violence.

Money

I think a big reason alcohol is still legal is that making it is so easy I've done it by accident a few times with a bottle of soda under my bed. (No, I didn't drink it.)

Because it's so easy and relatively cheap to make from ingredients that are basically impossible to ban - yeast spores are floating around in the air, and carbohydrates and water are necessary for human life - there's no way to keep it from being produced.

because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.