- Two thirds of the deaths (about 117,000 deaths) are due to chronic conditions that develop from long-term alcohol use, including various types of cancer, heart disease, liver disease, and alcohol use disorder.

- One third of these deaths (about 61,000 deaths) happen from drinking too much on one occasion, such as from motor vehicle crashes, poisonings involving substances in addition to alcohol, and suicides.

I’m also wondering what is considered “dying of alcohol”. Is it only when you drink so much that you die directly from the drinking? Or is it including drunk driving and the like?

Sibling comment provided a pretty good breakdown of the numbers and split

Well you can also die from withdrawals when your BAC is zero.

Which is why hospitals are stocked with "medical vodka" (actually just regular vodka) to administer to patients suffering from severe withdrawals. It can take a few days to get down to surviving on 0 BAC, though of course unpleasant (but not fatal) withdrawal symptoms will persist for awhile longer.

I think people are missing your reference to the cases of people who had covid as the cause of death on their birth certificate and things like "headshot wound " as a contributing factor...

Do you really believe that happened? Or rather, putting aside the small number of coroners who might be criminally fraudulent, do you really think that was a thing?

I think it is probably straightforward for a trained professional to document the circumstances of a person's death. I suspect it is a lot harder to conclusively say "but for X, they would have survived". widespread fraud by coroners does not seem likely, but apathy and prioritization of resources is believable.

I believe that some people will do things surprising to me when it means money for them or their organization.

A recent case in point are the people in charge of the Harvard medical School cadavers who sold the organs on the sly, but you could probably find other examples of cases where monetary incentives distort what we were consider commonplace values