You're doing 3 much here. I think everyone understands the point you're making. I certainly understand your point anyway. Despite largely being a non-drinker (I probably have on average one or two drinks per month) I disagree with it wholeheartedly, mainly because it's taking the numbers out of context. *Anything* scaled up to be as widespread as alcohol use is going to have ridiculously skewed numbers and all the problems you raise with my thought experiment exist with yours - do you know what other drugs those alcohol users were taking? Do you know how much exercise they were getting? What sort of stress levels they had? Do you know how wealthy they were? What their sleep patterns were like? How polluted an area they lived in? Do you know how much sugar they regularly ingested? No? It's bullshit, isn't it?

Statistics like that are ALL bullshit. That's why you can look in a newspaper any given day of the week and find out something's going to both give you cancer and prevent cancer. Just look at this shower of shit for the reliability of establishing causality from "statistics":

http://www.anorak.co.uk/288298/scare-stories/the-daily-mails-list-of-things-that-give-you-cancer-from-a-to-z.html/

I've seen lives ruined by alcohol most definitely, but I've seen far more lives enhanced by it. Despite it being illegal and my personal drug of choice, I've seen more lives spoiled by marijuana than I have alcohol (I've also still seen more enhanced). If as many of my friends took crack or heroin as took marijuana and alcohol, I'd be hosting an intervention every week and burying someone every month.