I can try to answer this question.
I think one principle is that the more widely the drug is used, the more the impact on society. You have a different rate of impact based on the type of drug. Some drugs will create a more pronounced impact on mortality itself, some others will create more impact socially, such as car accidents or problems at work or calling in sick or violence. It's a little bit difficult to do those comparisons because you end up with different ratings how you weight each component of the impact; if you consider society or individuals and the medical consequences.
Overall, when you look at number of deaths, tobacco is clearly the main killer. After tobacco, then it's alcohol. That is because they are widely used. Right now, tobacco is used mostly by 20% of the Canadian population and alcohol is used by 80% of the Canadian population. In comparison, cannabis use is much lower than that.
When I mentioned the risk of inhalation, tobacco is killing half of the users due to the fact they inhale. It is possible that cannabis is also producing some mortality due to inhalation, but the numbers are much smaller and many cannabis users also smoke tobacco. When you try to calculate the number of deaths created by marijuana overall, the experts that have done those calculations—and we can send you the latest update because that was published in The Lancet one year ago—I don't have the number in front of me, but the number of deaths is minimal compared to alcohol and tobacco—that's clear.
I would say maybe the number of deaths is in the range of 2% to 5% compared to tobacco or alcohol.