There! Can you imagine a more obviously stupid claim? Cigarettes kill about 400,000 people per year in the U.S. alone, and tens of millions more worldwide.
But, so far as I know, it is not physiologically possible to absorb a fatal dose of nicotine by smoking. Nicotine can be lethal if swallowed or injected, but a cigarette contains perhaps 2% of the median lethal dose. There are no published reports of acute fatal overdose from cigarette smoking. When smoking kills, it does so through chronic disease.
Acute alcohol poisoning is the primary cause of about 400 deaths per year and a contributing cause in another 1000 (mostly overdoses of other drugs). That’s out of about 100,000 total alcohol-related deaths, the rest being from chronic disease, accident, suicide, and crime.
So if we looked at acute overdoses alone, we would miss all of the lethality of cigarettes and about 99% of the lethality of alcohol.
That’s why its so outrageous to for Andrew Sullivan to post a headline reading “Cannabis kills no one.”
Continue reading “Cigarettes kill no one”