>If as many people took crack as took alcohol the relative
>impact would be astronomical.
>

That is an interesting thought experiment and you could probably build a good case for it, however, more people use alcohol than they use crack. Most crack users also use alcohol. That would interfere with your experiment as well.

>Drinking alcohol is a societal norm meaning everyone does it.
>This means that like driving cars, voting Republican or eating
>sugar it has a big effect on society.
>

We can frame your thought experiment in several ways to procure varied results, however, the data speaks for itself.

--Nearly 88,0007 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol related causes annually, making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

--In 2012, alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities accounted for 10,322 deaths (31 percent of overall driving fatalities).

--In 2012, 3.3 million GLOBAL deaths, or 5.9 percent of all global deaths (7.6 percent for men and 4 percent for women), were attributable to alcohol consumption.


Let's compare this data to crack/cocaine:

--Cocaine is the second most commonly used illicit drug (following marijuana) in the United States. More than 34 million Americans (14.7%) age 12 or older have used cocaine at least once in their lifetime.

As you can see cocaine is a very popular drug, 34 million people in the United States alone. Let's look at the death rate:

--The researchers, who used information from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as well as other published literature, estimate that between 149 million and 271 million people worldwide use illegal drugs.

--Data from the World Health Organization suggests there were 250,000 deaths worldwide due to illicit drug use in 2004, compared with 2.25 million due to alcohol, and 5.1 million due to tobacco.

--Some 235 deaths were linked to cocaine last year, up from 196 in 2007. This is the fifth year in a row that the number of victims has risen.

--There were 1,738 deaths linked to all illegal drugs in 2008, up 8 per cent.

I am having trouble finding data for 2014 but as you can see, the amount of death's related to "hard drugs" are a fraction of alcohol related death's. Don't forget 35 million people used cocaine in the United States alone.


>This DOESN'T make it a "harder" drug than crack or heroin. It
>just makes it a more popular one.
>

I really think the data speaks for itself.

>Yes, it is a drug. Obviously. That's not news to anyone over
>the age of 13. We all had this conversation in school when
>teachers tried to tell us pot was going to rot our brains and
>leave us all giving handjobs for the next hit.

It apparently is news to some people.