How substance use caught up with, and overtook, infectious disease as a cause of death.
As countries grow richer, deaths from communicable disease collapse. Deaths attributable to tobacco, alcohol, and drugs do not. The result is a transition: addiction rises in relative importance even where per-capita rates are flat or falling. The story is clearest measured against infectious disease, and it is sweeping up the income ladder.
Substance ÷ infectious deaths. Above the dashed line, addiction kills more people than infection. Richer groups crossed long ago; middle-income countries are crossing now.
Each risk indexed to its 1990 level (= 100). Tobacco is ~80% of the total and is nearly flat; the real surge is drug use.
Indexed to 1990 = 100, global totals. A value of 257 means 2.57× the 1990 level.
The honest wide-angle view. Substance use is a roughly steady share of all deaths while infectious disease has been cut in half, so the two have converged.
Share of all deaths (all-cause denominator from World Bank crude death rate × population). Substance is risk-attributable and overlapping, so it is an upper bound.
documentation/DOWNLOAD_INSTRUCTIONS.md. Wired to appear here
once that data is in place.