You're 14 Times More Likely To Die of Cancer Than From an Opioid Overdose

Your odds of dying:

• From an opioid overdose: 1 in 96
• From cancer: 1 in 7

Cancer is 14 times more likely to kill you than opioids. I checked the math. I used a calculator and everything.

Avoiding opioid death is straightforward: don't take opioids. Or if you do take them, take the correct amount, which is printed on the bottle. Avoiding cancer is harder: don't have cells that multiply incorrectly. The instructions are less clear. You can't just tell your cells "please multiply correctly" because cells don't listen. They don't have ears.

Yet the opioid "epidemic" gets wall-to-wall media coverage and urgent political action. Cancer gets a 5K run where everyone wears the same color shirt and feels like they helped. Running is great exercise, but it's not the same as medical research. If it were, marathoners would be curing diseases left and right.

Why the difference in coverage? Because opioid deaths make better news. "Person dies from thing they chose to take" is a story with a villain, a victim, and someone to blame. "Person's cells betray them" is just Tuesday. You can't interview cancer cells and ask why they went rogue. They're cells. They don't have media training.

Also, you can blame opioid deaths on doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and personal choices. Cancer deaths can't be blamed on anyone specific, which makes them less useful for politicians. Politicians need villains. "I'm tough on cancer cells" doesn't win elections. "I'm tough on Big Pharma" does.

So you focus massive attention on the thing that kills 1% of the people killed by the other thing. This is what you're doing with statistics and democracy and the 24-hour news cycle.

Here's how to actually reduce deaths: spend 14 times more money on cancer research than on opioid prevention. Match the funding to the death rate. Use third-grade math. Proportions are when two ratios are equal to each other. You learned this in elementary school.

Or keep doing what you're doing. Give more airtime to the smaller problem because it has a better villain and simpler narrative. That typically works out great for getting reelected but not for reducing mortality.