Does alcohol kill as many people as drugs do?

Alcohol is a drug. It just happens to be a legal one. There are arguably more deaths from alcohol per year than from any other single drug, but again, the fact that alcohol is legal means it's much easier to obtain and there's considerably less social stigma associated with it... so it's not really a fair comparison. On a per user basis, it's probably among the safer drugs (though I admit I don't have any actual statistics to back that up).