I want to find out if there is a statistic on death caused by illegal
drug users vs legal drug users. For instance "Tobacco and alcohol"
users vs "speed and marijuana".

Dear lisasweetpea-ga 
For causes of deaths in the United States the following annual figures
are quoted on the web site Drugwarfacts.org.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/causes.htm
The source and justification for each figure is given on the site.
Tobacco  430,7001  
Alcohol  110,6402  
Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs  32,0003  
Suicide  30,5754  
Homicide  18,2725  
All Licit & Illicit Drug-Induced Deaths  16,9266  
Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin  7,6007  
Marijuana  08 

The National Center for Health Statistics' web site
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm provides additional
information.

Deaths/Mortality figures for 2000
"(All figures are for U.S.) Final 2000 data
Number of Deaths Annually: 2,403,351 
Death Rate (age-adjusted): 873.1 deaths per 100,000 population
Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.:
Heart Disease: 710,760
Cancer: 553,091
Stroke: 167,661
Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease: 122,009
Accidents: 97,900
Diabetes: 69,301
Pneumonia/Influenza: 65,313
Alzheimer's Disease: 49,558
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 37,251
Septicemia: 31,224"

A graph of causes of death, including drugs and alcohol appears at
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/research_data/health_consequences/andths.htm

"There were 19,102 Deaths From Drug-Induced Causes in 1999 (legal and
illegal drugs) (1999)
There were 175,000 Cocaine-Related Emergency Room Episodes in 1999
(2000)"
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/druguse.htm

"There were 19,358 Alcohol-induced deaths in the United States each
year, not including motor vehicle fatalities (2000)
There were 26,552 deaths in the United States  from Chronic Liver
Disease and Cirrhosis (2000)
Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis is the 12th leading cause of death
in the United States (2000)"
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/alcohol.htm

Please do ask for clarification of any part of this research or if the
links do not work.

answerfinder-ga

Search strategy
causes of death statistics
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=causes+of+death+statistics
causes of death statistics alcohol
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=causes+of+death+statistics+alcohol

P.S. I love your name!

Hi,

I'm posting this just to clarify answerfinder's first set of numbers.
I was confused by the number of digits in each number, ie; Tobacco 
430,7001.

When you look at the chart on the website cited, you will notice that
the last digit (in the above case = 1) is actually the footnote
superscript. So the correct figure for tobacco would be: 430,700.

Other than that, great answer Answerfinder. 

--K~