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Long ago I lived in a neighborhood full of boys around the same age. There were only 3 or 4 girls and maybe 5 small children there -- but there were at least 30 of us teenage boys. Needless to say, we got into all sorts of mischief.
By the time the oldest of us were reaching the age of 17, drugs and drinking were fairly common. Interestingly, however, drugs were dramatically easier to obtain than alcohol. We never talked about it but I suspect that all of us knew instinctively why that was.
In those days you had to be 18 to buy beer -- our favorite beverage -- and it was hard to get anyone to buy it for us. The drinkers who didn't use drugs wouldn't buy us beer. The only people who would were 18+ drinkers who were also involved with selling or using drugs. To those folks, however, alcohol was a fairly low priority. Drugs, on the other hand, they were usually ready to provide.
Why would drug users, who by definition are accustomed to breaking the law routinely, be willing to provide drugs to minors when law-abiding drinkers would almost always refuse to procure beer for them? Obviously, the answer is embedded in the question itself.
Dealing drugs to a minor is not a big legal distinction to a drug dealer. His business is already quite illegal. Alcohol dealers, on the other hand, have business licenses and significant fixed investments -- that they are unwilling to put at risk.
And the efficient, low-margin competition in legal alcoholic beverages remains a powerful deterrent to any large-scale illegal alcohol trade.
Alcohol was legal, regulated, and hard to obtain by kids. Drugs were illegal -- and therefore unregulated -- and trivially easy to obtain by teenagers.
While the availability gap between the two may have diminished as more people have become desensitised to law-breaking by drug laws, I suspect that some of the effect persists to this day.
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