numbers are a bit old, but:

Tobacco 435,000
Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000
Alcohol 85,000
Microbial Agents 75,000
Toxic Agents 55,000
Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347
Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000
Suicide 30,622
Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000
Homicide 20,308
Sexual Behaviors 20,000
All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect 17,000
Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin 7,600
Marijuana 0

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/causes.htm

So this source is trying to argue that 435,000 deaths are attributed to tobacco and 0 deaths are attributed to marijuana?

Both are smoked, both are filtered through the lungs, both contain carcinogens and both contain toxins.

I'm a huge proponent of pot, but come on...this is just silly.

An exhaustive search of the literature finds no credible reports of deaths induced by marijuana. The US Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) records instances of drug mentions in medical examiners' reports, and though marijuana is mentioned, it is usually in combination with alcohol or other drugs. Marijuana alone has not been shown to cause an overdose death.

Source: Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), available on the web at http://www.samhsa.gov/; also see Janet E. Joy, Stanley J. Watson, Jr., and John A. Benson, Jr., "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base," Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Research, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), available on the web at http://www.nap.edu/html/marimed/; and US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition" (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 57.

I never once hinted towards the idea that marijuana could cause an overdoes death. However, to say that marijuana has never lead to an onset of lung cancer or heart disease seems pretty outrageous.

Every medical chart is going to indicate whether a person smokes cigarettes or not. Moreover, people are more inclined to admit tobacco use than they are to admit habitual marijuana use. Therefore the medical records are not necessarily a reliable indicator of whether a patient used marijuana.

I think the majority would agree that similar to cigarettes, habitually smoking marijuana can lead to lung cancer and heart disease. If your going to include deaths from smoking cigarettes then it is impossible to say that habitually smoking marijuana has never killed anyone. Smoking can lead to cancer which in turn can lead to death.

did you read the link i posted?

Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.

They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.

"This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."

Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar.

Also, increased risk of heart disease would seem unlikely since marijuana is a depressant, not a stimulant like nicotine.

I was wrong. Will read articles before posting. However, I will point out that the study was based on a survey and no real medical evidence. Anyway...it makes me feel better about getting high.

*sparks a joint*

I've always contended that cigarettes are much, much worse for you than smoking weed - should you keep that to once a day or a few times a week.

wait, do you mean to tell me that our biggest dangers are ourselves?

We need the government to protect us from ourselves.

I was ready to this, but seeing who posted this, it might be sarcastic.

I'm never sarcastic. I'm being forward thinking from a societal perspective. And seeking to become apart of the mainstream. Individualism and independence has clearly led to this situation where we are the biggest dangers to ourselves. So we clearly need the government to protect us from ourselves.

We need anti-smoking laws, and wild taxation on cigarettes to keep people from smoking. And we need laws that force people to get health insurance and ban stuff like trans-fats. We should also start taxing fast food joints into oblivion. We clearly need big government to ban all guns to protect us from shooting ourselves. So on and so forth.

So if someone dies in an alcohol related car crash does that count for both motor vehicle deaths and alcohol deaths?

that and i'm also wondering how sober victims of inebriated drivers crashing into them are labeled.

Yes, marijuana contains carcinogens.

The difference is that people who die from cigarettes smoke a pack a day, at least, for years and years. Even hardcore potheads don't smoke 20+ joints a day. That would just be stupid. You can only get so stoned.

also:

A Research Triangle Institute study concluded that THC, a dilative agent, may help cleanse the lungs by dilating the bronchi, and could actively reduce the instance of tumors.

those misplaced commas are confusing me

commas were correct: my editing was poor.