At 08:16 PM 3/15/96 -0800, Blanc or somebody she was replying to wrote:

...

.... Tobacco, which kills an estimated 400,000 a year is the winner. (The statistics I saw a few years ago were easily memorizable: tobacco: 400,000, alchohol: 40,000, drugs: 4,000.)

99% of US drug deaths are from legal drugs. Alcohol's more like 100,000, as of 1990 figures, about 20% of US drug deaths; this is just disease-related deaths, excluding drunk driving. Tobacco was about 370K or 390K, roughly 75%. Prescription drugs were about 20,000, including suicides, and I don't know if this included prescription opiates like morphine and codeine. Caffeine, my personal favorite, is 5000-10000, though it's much harder to estimate how much it really contributes to heart attack deaths. Cocaine was about 2500, heroin 2000, PCP 700, the rest lower, total about 1%. Marijuana was its usual 0 deaths. As Tim says, it's far from crypto - but one of the main excuses for money-laundering laws is to track down pharmaceutical wholesalers' profits. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...