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Traffic jams like this might actually be saving our lives.

(Frances Micklow/The Star-Ledger)

Between the Jimmy Hoffa rumors, the toxic waste jokes and the cloud of incipient road rage hanging over our highways, New Jersey hardly seems very safe.

Yet the other 49 states can step aside for this important announcement:

We’re the safest state in the nation.

No, seriously, we really are.

According to the latest data crunched by the National Safety Council, New Jersey has the lowest rate of deaths caused by injury.

"It’s about time New Jersey ended up at the top of a good list," said Kenneth Kolosh, manager of statistics for the Illinois-based council.

"It’s definitely really good news," said Christina Tan, the state epidemiologist.

The bulk of injuries nationwide can be chalked up to three causes: motor vehicle crashes, poisonings — mostly drug and alcohol overdoses — and falls. (The stats are for unintentional injuries, so they exclude suicide.)

There are various reasons behind the numbers in each category:

• Because of the state’s population density, New Jersey drivers spend a lot of time on roads that are congested and have lower speed limits. That ends up keeping us safer, Kolosh said. While motor vehicle accidents are still our leading cause of injury-related death, the fatality rate here is one-third of that seen in rural states such as Montana or North Dakota.

•The "poisonings" category is driven by the epidemic abuse of prescription pain relievers such as Oxycontin. While we do have that problem, it is less severe here than in other states.

•And while we have our share of falls, we do better than other states. This category is mostly driven by age: the older the population, the more falls. Tan, the epidemiologist, noted several programs started by the New Jersey to reduce falls by helping seniors improve their balance and flexibility.

New Jersey is twice as safe as states such as Montana or New Mexico.

It also helps, of course, that overall, New Jersey is a relatively wealthy state — as are all those that have a lower injury rate than the national average.

Residents of wealthier and more urban states are less likely to hold jobs that are intrisically dangerous, Kolosh said. New Jersey isn’t going to produce a lot of mining deaths or tractor tragedies, for example.

Keep in mind: Safety and health are not the same thing. New Jersey ranks fifth for cases of adult AIDS; third for pediatric AIDS; seventh for tuberculosis; and 10th for Alzheimer’s.

Nationally, injuries are the fifth-leading cause of death, behind heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases and stroke.

Our relatively low rate of traffic fatalities also can be linked to geography. Because of the state’s small size, a New Jersey crash victim is never far from a hospital. By contrast, in a larger Western state like Montana, a victim might die of injuries on the long trip to the nearest emergency room.

New Jersey also has graduated license laws that introduce younger drivers gradually to the challenges of driving. Motor-vehicle fatalities are the leading cause of accidental death for the 15-to-24 age group.

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When it comes to injuries, poisonings — largely drug deaths — have now overtaken car accidents as a bigger killer. The culprit is non-medical use of prescription pain relievers, Kolosh said. "They cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined," he said. "That has really been a epidemic."

"It may be a demographic issue. Prescription drug abuse tends to be more Caucasian," Kolosh said.

In addition, New Jersey has a new a prescription drug monitoring system — a database in which prescriptions are entered. Doctors may check it to see if anyone has forged prescriptions from them. The database would also pick up incidents of "doctor-shopping," in which a single patient visits multiple doctors to get duplicate prescriptions for the same medication.

The least-safe state in the current ranking is New Mexico. It has the rural roads that produce high-speed accidents; the large distances that impede timely emergency medical assistance; a bad problem with drugs and alcohol; an older population that is susceptible to falls; and a high rate of accidents with firearms.

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