Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> True. Dan Lazare told me back in the high-crime days of the early
> 1990s, a friend of his compared the risks of a teenager getting hurt
> or killed from urban street crime vs. suburban car-driving. The risks
> of driving were far higher.
>
There has always been a greater focus on ills deliberately inflictedd (no matter how rare) than on ills which 'seem' just a fact of life. It enters into pacifist thought, for example, in a tendency to ignore, for example, industrial deaths and injuries but insist that demonstrators must be "non-violent" not only in practice but in abstract principle. (This is unfair to many, probably most, pacifists, but one does run into it.)
And of course the difference between marijuana and tobacco (not countijg the far greater danger of the latter) is an arbitrary law forbidding one but not the other. Hence horror at the drug dealer but on the whole great equanimity re tobacco companies. And so forth.
Carrol