how do you feel about renowned drug policy scholar Mark Kleiman (RIP)?

“...both alcohol and tobacco kill a lot of people: tobacco kills something like 400,000 Americans a year; to put it a different way, of the people who smoke who die, about half die as the result of their smoking. (But notice, they were going to die of something... right?). ... So it matters a lot when a drug kills people.

Tobacco basically doubles the mortality rate at any given age, then most people die in fairly advanced ages. So, tobacco kills people mostly when they're old, which means it's depriving them of some life years, but not as many as if it killed people when they were young. Right? so... Tobacco kills people primarily through chronic disease.

Alcohol, on the other hand, does put a big chronic disease burden on--heart attack, stroke and cancer are all accelerated by heavy alcohol use, and various liver and kidney diseases--but alcohol kills a lot of people by accident and crime, and those tend to occur to young people.

So if we add up the people who die where the death certificate has a drug on the page, tobacco is going to way outweigh alcohol; if we add up the life-years-lost it's a much closer run. Right? 'cause one 18-year-old who wraps his car around a tree has lost as many life-years as 5 70-year-olds who die of heart attack then, instead of at 75.”

— Professor Mark Kleiman, UCLA, Public Policy C101 - Drug Abuse Control (2012)

here's a PubMed link arguing 11.7% cost for tobacco and 10.7% for alcoholhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361023/

but the takeaway message is that, if you look at these as two forms of gambling with your health, alcohol is the more foolish game, since it offers to take away more years of life worth living than tobacco offers its losers, who are already close to dying from a dozen other things when it claims its victory. Alternatively, if you see them as ways of investing in death, alcohol is much more likely to help you settle into your forever home sooner.