I would say there are no illegal drugs as nasty as alcohol or nicotine, and
I have both tried them all and lived in communities where all were being
tried. Nicotine kills over 400,000 people in this country annually. I
seriously doubt that if a quarter of the American population used legal
heroin that the mortality rate from it would be any perceptible fraction of
that, given that heroin lethality is almost entirely due to dosage
irregularity. Of course, there would be social and economic consequences
of having a quarter of the population on the nod, but I think they would be
balanced by taking that same quarter off the more socially disastrous legal
sedative, alcohol. For social disruption, alcohol has no peer, not even
crack. The vast majority of all domestic violence is alcohol related.
Indeed, alcohol is implicated in the more than 70 percent of all violent
crimes and more than 50 percent of all traffic deaths. What could be
nastier than that?

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