Death rates comparing illegal drugs to alcohol & tobacco

[Chronicle]

Hello
I was having a convo with someone, and this came up. This is in no way to discuss illegal drugs, only as much as you would describe murder in a discussion about murder. Don't get this thread closed by talking about what and how much you've taken... it'll just get closed

Anyway, I am just interested if anyone can find out some stats, comparing the % of "drug" users to alcohol or tobacco users, that die.

I've found
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_info1.shtml

which has:

Deaths per user:

Alcohol = 100,000/140,000,000 = .07 % or 70 per 100,000

Cocaine = 1,000/ 12,200,000 = .008 % or 8 per 100,000



Deaths per abuser:

Alcohol = 100,000/18,000,000 = .56 % or 56 per 10,000

I've found quite a few stats just about how many deaths there were, but they are a bit misleading, as alcohol has a lot more users than almost any other drug probably. So i'm after %-ages of users / abusers (abusers = someone addicted to the drug really)

Cocaine = 1,000/ 250,000 = .40 % or 40 per 10,000

Cheers.

 

[Efour]

Well a cocaine user is just as likely to be smoking a fag and have a beer in his hand. at the same time.

Im not sure how this will work

ive probably badly read your post lemme try again

can you try it with something like Heroin, i think that would be easier. As thats probably more likely to recorded as a Big OD.

Coke could be anything like crashing your car into a wall at 120mph that kind of thing. Not just heart failure

 

[Visage]

The problem, I would imagine is that the numbers at the far end of the scale - where people actually die, are both tiny proportions of the total users.

So to suggest, as those figures do that the tiny minority of cocaine users that die is a smaller tiny minority than the tiny minority of alcohol users that die is dodgy reasoning at best....