While I agree about greater deaths from other things, just to play advocate, what's your source? A google search isn't exactly refereed.
Not just that, but lots more people eat food, drive cars, drink alcohol, have sex, smoke, etc. etc. than do drugs.
I wouldn't be so sure about that... You'd be surprised by how many poeple smoke weed regularely... Here (Canada), it's a good 20-30% of poeple who smoke sometimes. For the source of the graph: here it is scroll to BEHAVIORAL CAUSES OF DEATH (I've no idea if it's a good source though... although I've seen similar stats often)
I think a better study for this argument would be one that looks at the percentage of people doing drugs (not people in general) who die from the drug. I'd be willing to bet that less than 30% of the US population regularly uses drugs in an illicit manner. I would bet that there are a lot more people than that abusing food, and a lot more smoking cigarettes, too. The graph that you posted is only useful for somebody trying to keep a record of common and not-so-common causes of death. It doesn't help to show the likelihood of something killing or not killing somebody.
Yeah the bias is pretty simple. If the number of people partaking in an activity is different, then a percentage is needed. Lets say... out of 100 racecar drivers, 10 died. Out of 10 junkies, only 2 died. That chart pretty much screams (at least in the context it's posted in) hey... racecar driving is much less safe than heroin addiction... 10 drivers died and only 2 junkies. Of course it's obvious that twice as many junkies die.
I'd also be curious to know the percentage of drug-related versus directly caused by drugs. I'd also like to see the drug deaths separated by drug type. Classifying weed and heroin in the same category is a little bit ridiculous.
Its hard to tell with anything that has residual amounts in the blood stream. One of the reasons why MJ has that stat that it's involved with xx% of ER visits is because if the person tests positive then they will say it was a factor. So... if Johnny smokes a doob on tuesday and a piano falls on him a week later, the ER will say it was because he got high. Don't get high, Johnny!
