Time Magazine reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions believes marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin. I’m glad somebody finally gets it!
Shall we look at some statistics?
Annual Number of Deaths in the US, as reported by CDC (2015)
All Causes 2,712,630
Deaths Attributed to Tobacco Smoking 480,320
Accidents (Unintentional Injuries) [Total] 146,571
Motor Vehicle Accidents 37,757
Deaths Attributed to Drug Overdose 63,632
Overdose Deaths Involving Any Opioid 42,249
Overdose Deaths Involving Heroin 15,469
Intentional Self-Harm (Suicide) 44,193
Injury by Firearms 36,252
Alcohol-Induced Deaths 33,171
Homicide 17,793
Deaths Attributed to Cannabis (Marijuana) 0
A Death Attributed to Marijuana
A man in New Brunswick, New Jersey lost his life when a bale of Marijuana fell from a helicopter and hit him.
Officials theorized he was attempting to catch it.
Big Pharma lied
Big Pharma lied about how addictive opioid medications were, but not one company has faced real punishment for unleashing the opioid epidemic. Pharmaceutical companies told sales reps to claim that opioids like OxyContin were less addictive and less likely to be abused than other painkillers. (Bernie Sanders)
Sacklers
The Sackler family, known for giving money to arts, has made a fortune from their creation of OxyContin, since 1996.
A Stanford ethics professor said “Greed is the main thing. The market for OxyContin should have been much, much smaller, but they wanted to have a $10bn drug and they didn’t tell the truth about their product.”
Right now, the family has avoided lawsuits, but the companies they run haven’t. Lawyers are aiming to hold them responsible, though.