Heroin/opioids crisis? What about cigarettes?

CNN has seven stories today on the national "crisis" of heroin abuse. Meanwhile, cigarette smoking kills five times as many people in the US per year, including 10% from second-hand smoke. And tobacco is legal. So which is the real crisis?

STAT forecast: Opioids could kill nearly 500,000 in U.S. in next decade

CDC - Fact Sheet - Fast Facts - Smoking & Tobacco Use

 

People who smoke cigarettes can remain gainfully employed.

 

Cigarettes, the real gateway drug.

 

Sure -- unless they're dead.

 

Straight from the 1950s: Girls who will smoke cigarettes will ...

 

At my last newspaper job they put in a policy that (as I understood it) they wouldn't hire a smoker or someone married to a smoker, because of what it did to insurance premiums. They also stopped allowing smokers to take their smoke breaks on company property.

Extreme, but I was happy with it. Just like I was happy to see in Vancouver this summer that tobacco products there, at least the ones I saw purchased in convenience stores, were about four times more expensive than in the US.

 

Tobacco is big business with a powerful lobby. Just take note of their influence over Vice President Mike Pence. It's not going anywhere, even though it should.

 

When people are routinely breaking into houses to get cigarette money or leaving their kids helpless in the back seat of a hot car because they're passed out up front from a nicotine overdose, get back to me.

 

My grandfather died when I was less than a year old and my dad died two months before my daughter was born.

It ain't a hot car, but it ain't nothing.

 

What about red meat and sugar?

 

It's not like the cigarette "epidemic" has been ignored in terms of state and federal resources used to fight it.

 

Nobody not named Mike Pence disputes that tobacco is a public health disaster. But the nonsensical whataboutism in the original post ("So which is the real crisis?") not only downplays a genuine crisis w/r/t opioids but ignores the fact that tobacco use is way down in America the last couple of decades.