From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 10:45:23 +0800
To: Blanc Weber <blancw@MICROSOFT.com>
Subject: RE: Tim's friend's mildly retarded son
Message-ID: <199603160809.AAA01009@ix14.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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...