Drunk drivers kill more people than cigarette smoke?
I got into an argument with a friend of mine the other day. He was complaining about the tax on cigarettes even though he doesn't smoke. He said it was foolish for Democrats to tax cigarettes so much. I told him that a lot of people were dying because of cancer caused by cigarettes, and the high tax caused less people to want to smoke. Then, he told me that drunk drivers killed more people than cigarettes could ever kill. There was no way I could prove him wrong. A relative of mine died five years ago from cancer. He had smoked cigarettes almost all of his life. Do drunk drivers really kill more people than cigarettes?
Answers:
I'm pretty sure cigarette-smoking-related illnesses kill more people than drunk drivers, and I *hate* drunk drivers (one killed my sister). That said, it's an odd argument to be having. BOTH are really bad. No matter which one kills more people, that doesn't make the other one okay.
In my opinion, yes drunk drivers do kill more people than people that die from smoking cigarettes. Drunk drivers cannot control them selves and might get into a car crash. Smokers can quit but not easily, therefore drunk drivers are more dangerous.
It might be,
but the number of deaths caused by actual smoking and second hand smoke is difficult to ascertain. Of course it is pretty easy to ascertain if someone was killed by a drunk driver:
Is the person dead as a result of a car accident?
Was the driver of the offending car intoxicated?
With smoking it is much more difficult.But I imagine the number of deaths caused by smoking must be huge.. many, many more than drunk drivers!
But this is a lousy reason for a tax.this is not what taxes are for!
There needs to be a better way to discourage smoking.
Adding a tax simply undermines the credibility of the reason for taxation!
It's almost impossible to measure these things. Let's say you're in a crash, and the driver was drunk, and someone dies. How do you know whether or not the drunk driving was responsible for the crash? The crash might have happened even if the driver was sober. Similarly, someone who smokes might die of something else, and there is no way of knowing whether the smoking contributed.
But anyway, driving is necessary. We won't lose anything if we ban cigarettes, but we will lose a lot if we ban driving.
my aunt recently died of lung cancer. the death certificate said respitory complications . the lung cancer was obvisously the cause from years of smoking but it wasn't recorded this way . just like aids patients die and are recorded on the death certificiate that they have complications of pneumonia. how can we really tell from the death certificates what the real statistics are ?
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