Birth of a cocaine factoid: a prohibition-friendly estimate of drug-related deaths turns out to be bogus.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Columns - Column

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 banned for nonmedical use, led to widespread abuse and addiction. But it turns out the number is bogus.

The original version of the timeline cited Steven Karch's A Brief History of Cocaine as the source for the estimate. "According to a U.S. government report," Karch writes in the 2006 edition, "the total number of deaths from heroin and cocaine in the United States constitutes a smaller proportion of the total population now than it did in 1912, when the number exceeded 5000."

Karch then confusingly compares "the total number of deaths from heroin and cocaine" in 1912 to the number of "cocaine-related deaths" today. Given this juxtaposition, it's easy to see how readers might conflate the two categories. But where did Karch get the first number? Although he does not identify which "U.S. government report" he has in mind, Gabriel Nahas' 1989 book Cocaine: The Great White Plague seems to provide the answer: "According to a 1912 official publication by M.I.Wilbert and M.G. Motter of the United States Treasury Department, cases of fatal poisoning, excluding those due to alcohol, numbered 5,000 in one year and the majority were related to opium or cocaine."

Note that we have gone from "cocaine-related deaths" to "deaths from heroin and cocaine" to "cases of fatal poisoning." A table in the report cited by Nahas provides mortality figures, based on Census Bureau data, for deaths by poisoning in the years 1900 through 1910. The highest total--excluding alcohol, "inhalation of poisonous gases," lead, and "other occupational poisonings"--is...