Which Drug is the Biggest Killer?

There has been a great deal of media attention in recent times about the effects of Australia’s ‘ice epidemic’.

But while the abuse of illicit drugs can certainly have a devastating impact on users and the community, they do not lead to anywhere near as many preventable deaths as drugs that are legally available.

Tobacco

It is estimated that an incredible two out of every three lifetime tobacco smokers will die from a smoking-related illness.

Each year, smoking kills an estimated 15,000 people in Australia per year. Out of the 2.7 million smokers, approximately 1.8 million will lose their lives because of it.

Smoking is now the leading cause of preventable illness and death in Australia, accounting for 8% of all disease in 2003, and this is in the context of our nation having one of the lowest rates of smoking in the world.

Smoking is a leading worldwide killer, claiming the life of a person every six seconds.
It has an enormous detrimental impact on various organs in the body: leading to heart disease, stroke, peripheral vascular disease, cancers of the lung, and problems with the kidneys, pancreas, mouth, bladder, stomach, cervix and oesophagus.

Smoking is undisputedly the biggest killer – but what about when it comes to alcohol and illicit drugs?

Alcohol

Alcohol kills far fewer people than tobacco, but the numbers are still significant.

In 2010, excessive long-term alcohol consumption reportedly killed 5,544 people, while a further 157,132 were admitted to hospital. This does not include victims of alcohol fuelled violence. A total of 3.9 per cent of preventable deaths in that year were attributable to alcohol, peaking at 11.8 per cent in the Northern Territory. One-in-eight preventable deaths of men under the age of 25 were related to alcohol.

Alcohol is now seen as a contributing factor to over 200 diseases, including cancers and heart disease.

What about illicit drugs?

The precise number of deaths caused by illegal drugs is difficult to ascertain, although it is clear that both tobacco and alcohol are each responsible for more deaths than all illicit drugs combined.

In 2003, illicit drugs were found to be responsible for 2% of the total burden of preventable diseases.

In 2012, there were reportedly 1,427 drug-related deaths, although many of these were from overdoses of legal, prescription drugs.

Government crackdown on legal drugs

The government is ostensibly making an effort to reduce smoking by placing restrictions on where people can smoke, where they can buy cigarettes from and various marketing restrictions including in the areas of advertising and packaging.

Restrictions have also been placed on the sale of alcohol, with licensed venues in the city and Kings Cross being subjected to lockout laws service restrictions.

But despite these measures, the billions of dollars that Australian governments receive each year from tobacco and alcohol taxes ensures that they will remain legal, at least for a very long time to come.

Questions raised

Does our society have things the wrong way round?

Many who advocate the legalisation of so-called ‘lower-risk drugs’ like cannabis certainly think so; particularly given that cannabis use is much less likely to lead to death than many drugs that are currently legal. Indeed, the debate about the proposed legalisation of cannabis often highlights the relatively low-risk of health problems for light to moderate users.

But with governments that base decisions on dollars rather than sense, we can only speculate as to whether they will eventually get the balance right.