Alcohol is a food. It is digested like a food.
Actually, alcohol is not digested "like food". Alcohol is an organic solvent and is processed out of your body by your liver just like other poisons.
It is consumed typically with other foods. In its consumed forms it has nutritional value, in some cases like beer considerable value.
Even when smoked, marijuana is consumed typically with foods. Indeed, marijuanna is well known to stimulate appetite. Brownies which use marijuana as an ingredient have significant nutritional value. So what?
Non-alcoholic beer is available which is brewed as regular beer with much of the alcohol removed by vacuum evaporation. It contains the "considerable" nutritional value of other beer without the empty calories of alcohol.
Just how many people drink alcohol for its nutritional content?
It has proven effectiveness in fighting certain diseases in the right dosages.
Is alcohol, in its drug form, the only method of fighting those diseases? What percentage of drinkers consume alcohol only in the quantities sufficient to prevent disease?
And again, marijuana has supposed medical benefits from nausea reduction, appetite stimulant, reduction in the effects of glaucoma and even reducing arterial blockages. In fact, synthetic forms of THC are available as Marinol and other brand names. If the benefits of so-called "medical marijuana" can be synthesized without the downside of having any enjoyable side-effects, why not try to do the same thing with alcohol?
Opiates are fantastic cough suppressants. Cocaine is a good topical anesthetic, and certain amphetamines - in the right dosages - can be relatively safe stimulants. Medical capability of a drug is certainly something to be considered, but doesn't mean anything in and of itself.
It is often used to enhance the flavor of foods. It is widely used in industrial food applications. Like nutmeg.
Cocaine was once used in the same manner. Indeed, even today decocainized fluid extract of coca is still used to flavor foods and, most notably, still used in the production of Coca Cola. I would wager that there are methods that alcohol's flavor could be duplicated without its psychoactive effects.
In the other direction, people often cut alcohol with sweet fluids to help conceal the very flavor you laud. Some may do this to "enhance" the flavor of the juice or soft-drink, but more often I'll bet it is to make their drug of choice more palatable so consuming larger quantities is easier.
Now tell me how crack cocaine is no different from alcohol?
Straw man argument. I've never claimed that crack cocaine is no different from alcohol. However, just because they are very different doesn't mean that there are absolutely no similarities. For instance, whether or not you choose to recognize it, both are used as recreational drugs.
Let's be realistic for a moment. There are some very valid uses of alcohol that have nothing to do with recreation. You've pointed out several, and I'm sure we could think up quite a few more. The same could be said for other drugs as well. However, like other drugs, alcohol is also used recreationally, and it is used recreationally more often than medicinally or for its rather weak nutritional value. You believe very strongly that in a cost-benefits analysis, alcohol legality produces more positives than negatives. That might well be the case, but it might also be the case with other drugs. You advocate alcohol use and believe it should remain legal. You condemn illicit drug use and believe all illicit drugs should remain illegal. However, what you haven't shown is how you came to that conclusion. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but my guess is that you have no standards by which you judge drugs. That's why you have to resort to "Yeah, but what about crack and meth!?!?"
