It feels like the strength and type of withdrawal symptoms for each substance plays a big role here.

I've only ever been addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and while my withdrawal symptoms were terrible (almost-disabling headaches, anxiety, etc) I don't think they were ever so bad that it would make me violent.

As opposed to people I knew that were addicted to cocaine and meth which would go absolutely crazy for their next fix. In the particular case of the person that was addicted to cocaine, money was not an issue and would still become violent when the fix was not available, so I don't think it's necessarily a function of price or access to it.

Of course, my sample size is very small but given that I also know a ton of people that quit cigarettes and caffeine without becoming violent, I would say withdrawal symptoms are probably a strong component on how violent people get.

Drug war bad, but I'm not sure these drugs can be equated so simply. Caffeine has a mild euphoric effect but not nearly as much as meth. Both caffeine users and meth users are prone to hyper-focused behavior loops - e.g. super meticulous house cleaning. But meth is so much more euphoric that the behaviors don't have to be intrinsically rewarding at all. For many people, when you feel that high, doing pretty much anything is rewarding. That's why you get weird behaviors on meth like people pulling out their hairs one by one, or completely disassembling a working TV.

Those behaviors are not conducive to holding down most jobs. If our society did more work educating and supporting people in productively integrating their use of drugs into a functional lifestyle, maybe it would be less of a problem. Certainly there are some ways people could use meth that are positive. But I still think there's something about meth that makes it more likely to ruin lives than caffeine.

I agree, but Id say theyre part of the same continuum rather than fundamentally different.

>People would absolutely be burglarizing homes to feed their caffeine habit if caffeine wasn't dirt cheap due to the free market.

I'm about as caffeinated as most anyone else I know, and I would not. There are times where just putting on a pot of coffee is too much work for me to make my daily fix and I lazily skip it for the day.

I do get withdrawal headaches and probably behave a bit differently, but even then sometimes I don't make the effort to get it. I've been at conference and hotels where the only options were so badly made I skipped it for days and just took the headache.

I have to agree when my coworkers and I are chugging energy drinks from before work till the afternoon. I finally quit that level of intake because of panic attacks (still have 1-2 cups of coffee occasionally).

240mg of caffeine for breakfast! Certainly!