By weight/amount compared to other recreational drugs. i tried posting this on plebbit askscience but it was immediately removed for 'safety', maybe i had a comment on one of the "bad" sub reddits before and therefore my questions are potentially unsafe to view.

Most recreational drugs are active anywhere from the microgram range e.g. lsd to the handful of gram range e.g. phenibut. most drug doses are around 1mg to 500mg. But an alcohol/ethanol dose for a recreational effect is usually at least 25,000mg e.g. for a pint of 5% beer. A bottle of 13% wine has almost 80,000mg of ethanol and that for many might be a moderate-ish recreational dose. You could easily consume 200,000mg on a night out and not be too drunk. I've read that LSD has a very tight binding on the receptor it is an agonist for which is one reason why it's potent. Phenibut has doses in the 1-2 gram range, I've heard only a fraction of the of the dose ingested reaches the brain and it also has a lower affinity for the gabab receptor than baclofen, a drug with similar effects as phenibut but active in the tens of milligram range. Gabapentin does can also go fairly high, but typically in amounts an order of magnitude below ethanol doses.

What's up with ethanol, why does it take so much, volume wise, to induce recreational effects compared to many other drugs? I heard ethanol affects many receptors, often some of them being downstream as a result of a primary effect e.g. on the GABAa receptors where it acts as a positive allosteric modulator, and also as a result of antagonism on the nmda receptors. I've looked up other drugs that act as allosteric modulators on the GABAa complex but they are active in the <200mg range, although I do understand different drugs have different effects on the GABAa sub-types and there are lots of different sub-types so it might not be a straight forward answer.