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Article: Birth of a cocaine factoid: a prohibition-friendly estimate of drug-related deaths turns out to be bogus.(Columns)(Column)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- June 1, 2009
- Author:
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SCATTERED AROUND the Web, mostly at sites dealing with drug addiction, is a seemingly authoritative "Cocaine Timeline" that includes this 1912 milestone: "U.S. government reports 5,000 cocaine-related fatalities in one year." The number seems awfully high, given that the federal government's Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) counted about 4,000 "drug misuse deaths" involving cocaine in 2004, when the U.S. population was three times what it was in 19z1.
The U.N. International Narcotics Control Board cites the estimate of cocaine-related deaths circa 1912 as evidence that the legal availability of cocaine, which the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 effectively ...