Look at it this way, 15% of the US population smokes. Let's say they smoke a pack a day, 20 cigarettes. If I presented that data to the population as a whole as this journalist is doing, it would be "The US population smokes up to 3 cigarettes per person per day," which is technically true based on the math applied, but grossly misleading.

15*20/100 = 3.

They are applying a number of a subset of the population to the entire population. It's very misleading.

Edit: This journalist is also citing per year statistics, so take my math and multiply by 365, so that would be, "the US population smokes up to 1,095 cigarettes per person per year." The larger number implies that it is much worse. To add a little spice, I could say, "The US population smokes 1,095 cigarettes per year for every man, woman and child," which is exactly the same data set, but it's now implying that children are 1/3 of the people who smoke. Also most people don't envision a 17 year old as a child, so it further implies that young children (say 5-12) smoke.

The saddest part of this whole story is that this is what we can expect from serious journalism in this day and age. Gotta have their clicks!

You're right, that makes sense. So the situation is probably that most of the people take nothing and 5% or so takes 6 a day and lives in a permanent state of sedation.

Sedatives are different. Also people who are on painkillers lose the "high" after a while, so for the most part, they are normal functioning people, which is the idea.

Also, as an aside, take into account that there are 5+ million car accidents a year. I would guess that is or at least is one of the leading causes of chronic pain in the US.