In the first paragraph of the Washington Post‘s harrowing account (7/23/16) of an opioid addict in recovery, reporter Eli Saslow writes:

It had now been 12 days since the last time Amanda Wendler used a drug of any kind, her longest stretch in years.

Yet the story goes on to mention 11 times that, in her strenuous efforts to stay sober, Amanda is regularly taking another kind of drug:

Amanda lit a cigarette and sat in a plastic chair wedged between the cat food and the recycling bins in the garage, the only place where she was allowed to smoke…. She had no job, no high school diploma, no car and no money beyond what her mother gave her for Mountain Dew and cigarettes…. One minute — she could make it one minute. She watched a video on her cellphone. She sorted her nail polish and lit another cigarette…. Nineteen hours now until her appointment. She lit a cigarette and sat down in the garage…. Amanda stomped out her cigarette and headed inside…. Amanda walked out to the garage to light a cigarette and Libby followed…. “How’s Amanda doing?” friends and relatives would ask, at every graduation, wedding and baby shower, and what was Libby supposed to tell them?… That she was giving Amanda an allowance for cigarettes and cleaning up her moldy cereal bowls?… Amanda checked in at the main desk and then waited outside the front door, smoking a cigarette until a nurse came out to get her…. She would be outside in a few minutes smoking a cigarette, and she could catch a ride to Southwest Detroit and be high within an hour…. She lit a cigarette. She took a deep breath and wiggled her toes and squeezed her arms and rolled her neck and decided she felt . . . fine…. She dropped her cigarette and crawled into the back seat of the car.

It’s not mere pedantry to note that cigarettes are, obviously, a “drug of any kind.” They’re actually a drug that kills far more people in the US than opioid overdoses—480,000 per year, according to the CDC, vs. 28,647 for opioid ODs.

And it’s not just because more people smoke cigarettes: With approximately 2.3 million people addicted to opioid painkillers and to heroin, 28,647 ODs produces an annual death rate of 1.2 percent—the same death rate you get from dividing 480,000 smoking-related deaths among 40 million smokers.

Opioid addiction is certainly a serious problem. But in describing its heartbreaks, it’s irresponsible to present smoking, by contrast, as a mere bad habit—when that habit is responsible for 16 times as many of this country’s funerals every year.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.