there's this idea that marijuana doesn't kill anybody. i've stated it myself. but it's wrong.

if you were to claim that tobacco doesn't create overdoses, you'd be correct. so, would you then claim that tobacco doesn't kill anybody?

overdose deaths from tobacco: 0.

in fact, tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death.

one of the things about prohibition is that it skews the statistics, and i'll admit that it's never going to be easy to separate deaths caused by tobacco from deaths caused by marijuana, because it's such a heavy overlap. when a marijuana smoker gets lung cancer, or heart disease, it's never going to be clear if the primary cause is the marijuana or the tobacco that this person also smokes, along with the unhealthy diet and the sedentary lifestyle. what we can say, right now, is that prohibition removes marijuana from the statistics.

full legalization should hopefully allow us to better understand marijuana smoke as a risk factor for heart disease, for cancer, for emphysema, for diabetes, for stroke - for all the things we've tied so heavily to tobacco.

and, in a decade or two, this idea that marijuana doesn't kill anybody is going to be a surreal joke about how ignorant we were.