cocaine deaths: statistics, lies and damned lies
Jacob Sullum in Reason...
Scattered around the Web, mostly at sites dealing with drug addiction (here and here, for example), is a "Cocaine Timeline" that includes this 1912 milestone: "U.S. government reports 5,000 cocaine-related fatalities in one year." The number seems awfully high, given that the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) counted about 4,000 "drug misuse deaths" involving cocaine in 2004, when the U.S. population was about 294 million, three times what it was in 1912....
Sullum then documents the origins of the number. Cocaine-related becomes heroin and cocaine related-- which becomes all "cases of fatal poisoning, excluding those due to alcohol". The inflated 5,000 number turns out to originate from Census Bureau data on deaths by poisoning in the years 1900 through 1910.
The highest total, including suicides but leaving out alcohol (2,578 deaths), "inhalation of poisonous gases" (1,837), lead (86), and "other occupational poisonings" (five), is for 1909, when it was 4,503. If you round that up, you get 5,000, which presumably is how Nahas arrived at his number....
After I emailed the folks at Erowid about this factoid, they corrected their timeline. But the number is still floating out there in many different places, including the website of the U.N.'s International Narcotics Control Board. No doubt drug warriors will continue to cite it as evidence of prohibition's success....
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 12:02 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Cocaine statistics and Cocaine Prices vary because of many factors. For a good reference on how these are estimated, read this two-part article on Erowid:
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml
You can also visit DopeStats, which is a new source that estimates data such as street prices and usage rates
I was thinking the same thing that that number was awfully High now I'm sure there's people who died of cocaine overdose but I haven't heard of any recently where I live most of the deaths have been related to laced meth or bad heroin. I Feel this is all government propaganda it's a money-making scheme there is no War on Drugs because there will always be drugs they don't tell you the number of deaths that occur from regular Pharmaceuticals not even opiate-related side effects to most drugs prescribed by a physician or a hell of a lot worse than some of the older street drugs like marijuana or cocaine it really irritates me the way our government has lied and made people believe these lies yet there are probably just as many rich doctors lawyers and upscale people who use drugs on a regular basis as there are people in the streets but they just assume it's people that are homeless or living on the street that use drugs what a fantasy world we live in what people believe in anything they hear on TV or supposedly that the government puts out that's fact thank you for your article
I was thinking the same thing that that number was awfully High now I'm sure there's people who died of cocaine overdose but I haven't heard of any recently where I live most of the deaths have been related to laced meth or bad heroin. I Feel this is all government propaganda it's a money-making scheme there is no War on Drugs because there will always be drugs they don't tell you the number of deaths that occur from regular Pharmaceuticals not even opiate-related side effects to most drugs prescribed by a physician or a hell of a lot worse than some of the older street drugs like marijuana or cocaine it really irritates me the way our government has lied and made people believe these lies yet there are probably just as many rich doctors lawyers and upscale people who use drugs on a regular basis as there are people in the streets but they just assume it's people that are homeless or living on the street that use drugs what a fantasy world we live in what people believe in anything they hear on TV or supposedly that the government puts out that's fact thank you for your article
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