Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people than opioids

I&#x27;ve never been a fan of these kinds of articles. They beg the question &quot;Why arent we doing X?&quot;. There&#x27;s a similar article about &quot;Why aren&#x27;t we stopping gamblers from addictive behavior?&quot; on HN&#x27;s front page. They seem to share a trend:<p>They look for legalistic controls over an individuals actions. And both attempt to say that their actions are addictive, therefore we cannot trust their actions, so we have to decide for them. I&#x27;m not comfortable with that logic. Nor am I for shoving more drugs underground. Cause that&#x27;s that high taxation and controls do.<p>I tend to go on the side of freedom, even if it&#x27;s &quot;free to be dumb&quot;. And people will do destructive things. I don&#x27;t particularly like this notion of nanny state.

The subtitle is &quot;Should they be considered an “epidemic”&quot; and it says in the article &quot;We don’t often call alcohol or tobacco “epidemics,” even as we regularly use that same language for opioids that are linked to a fraction of the deaths from alcohol or tobacco.&quot;.<p>They are basically proposing to re-define epidemic. Traditionally, an epidemic is the rapid spread of something, usually a disease but not necessarily. Alcohol and tobacco have already rapidly spread. There&#x27;s nowhere else for them to spread.

This doesn&#x27;t seem to be the right metric. Surely, alcohol and tobacco are more common than opioids. To judge how defensible a certain consumption or action is, surely you need to see to the danger _per instance_. If not, I&#x27;m sure there are many other, perfectly normal, things that would en up on top of the list.

Why do we spend billions of dollars on airport security when nobody in this country dies from terrorism, yet 66,000 people die every year from guns and cars? Because we&#x27;re fine with people dying en masse if it doesn&#x27;t bother our morals or make us afraid.<p>Also, thanks for flagging this article. Intellectual discussion about critical health and safety issues is clearly off topic.

It boggles me that we still are faced with aggregated statistics to deny there is opioid crisis going on. If nothing else, alcohol and tobacco are also prone to addiction and should be curbed as well.

Living in Berlin and coming from Eastern Europe I would say that people smoke and drink a lot more than US.<p>It’s quite normal to have a glass of wine with your business lunch in Italy and Portugal. As well as a cigarette allowed restaurants in Czech Republic, and smokers bars here in Berlin.<p>Almost everyone drinks and smokes at least on the weekend. I was really shocked when I visited SF 2 months ago to discover that having a beer and a cigarette is impossible at any bar I tried ( smoking was forbidden 20 feet from entrance ).<p>Not sure how does it help reduce the death percentage compared to here ( Europe ) where most people consume moderately.

What about the percentage of users vs deaths? The numbers speak of something, but it would be unwise to use the numbers as a metric to say that opioids are safer than tobacco and alcohol.

The author seems to be striving to miss the point.<p>There&#x27;s a big difference between dying of cirrhosis, heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema, etc in middle age and a 19-year-old kid OD&#x27;ing a couple of weeks or months after falling down the addiction spiral.<p>It&#x27;s not just the number of deaths, it&#x27;s the impact to society. Line cooks don&#x27;t steal kitchen equipment to buy booze and smokes. Opiate addiction upends lives in a way that alcohol and tobacco simply do not.

This article tackles death from hundreds and thousands of individual choices as if it were death by accident which a few regulations could cut in half. Everyone knows smoking kills you quicker, but still 11% of U.S. adults choose to smoke. You want to increase the burden on their already burdened existence? Have a heart. Let people slowly kill themselves in peace.

Overeating also kills. Lack of exercise kills and so on.<p>Opiods are different, IMO, because they are generally issued by doctors, and they can kill you pretty quickly. Alcohol and tobacco, while dangerous, do give quite a bit of time to change and be saved.<p>Obviously the govt should do anti-smoking campaigns, but opiods are different.

I’ve never heard of a court ordering drug addicts to consume alcohol or tobacco as part of their sentence. In certain states however, courts routinely order addicts into opioid drug replacement therapy programs during sentencing.

The solution to all three is probably to offer more support for addicts and other mental health issues.

We should make them illigal like illegal drugs that fixed everything.

We tried banning alcohol once already...