SATURDAY REWIND: Nicotine vs. Alcohol, which one is worse?

This story from the alcohol research news archive demonstrates that while neither smoking or drinking are good health choices, there's a body of evidence that says alcohol is responsible for more harm than smoking. 

When a person recognizes there’s a problem with his or her drinking, quitting or cutting back can be as life-changing as pledges to work out more or promises to get a new job. Here are additional considerations about alcohol use disorders, quitting and staying sober.

Alcohol is a mass killer in the United States and is the defining public health issue for the 21st century. Driving under the influence has statistically little to do with those conclusions. Just under 10,000 motor vehicle deaths, 40 percent of the total, stem from alcohol-related crashes. To put that into context with other preventable deaths:
157,000 lung cancer deaths annually
50,000 people are killed in gun violence
39,520 breast cancer deaths
37,000 fatal overdoses from prescription drugs
34,000 suicides
30,000 Americans still die of the flu
18,000 people are killed in our hospitals by staph infections

Every alcohol-related car crash death is heartbreaking, but by the numbers, those deaths make up very little of the death toll from alcohol use. Even if you ended drinking and driving, alcohol is still our nation’s number one killer:
89,000 other deaths (not in cars) are directly attributed to alcohol; and,
1,000,000 more fatalities from diseases are indirectly attributed to alcohol (e.g. alcohol causes a condition leading to death).

It’s easy to be offended by drinking and driving. What’s even more offensive is the underreporting of the health effects of alcohol that prove alcohol is our defining health issue. Tobacco has at times held that mantle, but by comparison, only 473,000 die annually of smoking-related illness. Beverage alcohol kills more than a million. A 2012 study by the German University Medicine Greifswald found that heavy drinkers are at more risk of death than those who smoke.

The way America has responded to tobacco awareness campaigns holds promise for alcohol awareness campaigns, should one be mounted. In 1967, smoking was “in.” Seventy-six percent of adult men smoked. Today smoking is “out” and health officials at the Food and Drug Administration believe by 2020 smoking will be banned in all states. This is happening within just a generation and a half because smoking’s health effects are no longer underreported or reported only in obscure medical publications. With alcohol, as with smoking, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.
-- Entire story appears on examiner.com

As a side note on a possible smoking/drinking link, a study from Baylor this summer found that smoking can increase the likelihood of a person becoming an alcohol abuser. Researchers discovered that even a small amount of nicotine can increase the likelihood because nicotine is powerful enough to change how the brain perceives alcohol as a reward it craves.
www.alcohologist.com