None of that is necessarily true and death is extremely rare and likely caused by other coincidental factors. I do know there was alot of fear mongering in the political atmosphere and things done out of irrational reactionary policy making to cater the interests of some voters in the past. I dont think a crack and ephedrine safety comparison is fair at all. Nowhere are doctors prescribing therapeutic doses of crack to help people, ephedrine yes.
Here is a good study on ephedrine safety.
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Subgroup analyses revealed no strata with significantly elevated risk. In the case-control substudy, there was no increased risk among naïve users or users with large cumulative doses. Prescribed ephedrine/caffeine was not associated with a substantially increased risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes in this study.
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The evidence linking ephedrine to cardiovascular morbidity is based mainly on spontaneous reporting. However, with the very large number of users (3) and their possible adverse health behavior (13), coincidental cardiovascular events probably occur in large numbers.
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For one endpoint, death occurring outside of a health institution, we observed odds ratios below unity. This should not be taken too literally as a protective effect. One possible explanation is that some of these subjects died at home from chronic nonmalignant diseases that had not resulted in secondary care contacts. These subjects were obviously very unlikely to have used ephedrine/caffeine shortly before their deaths. In addition, some subjects with impending cardiovascular events could have been warned by subtle symptoms and could have chosen to discontinue use of ephedrine for fear of its claimed toxicity. We performed a subanalysis in subjects with no prior cardiovascular diagnoses and no prior use of cardiovascular, antidiabetic, antithrombotic, or antihypertensive agents (Table 3). The estimate for this subgroup differed very little from the main estimate (OR = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.61, 1.08; after adjustment for trend, OR = 0.84, 95% CI: 0.62, 1.14). These “confounding-by-contraindication” effects are difficult to manage in observational studies, insofar as the warning symptoms are not always captured by available data sources, and we cannot rule out the possibility that the odds ratios for the main estimates may have been biased downward.
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Another limitation is that in our main analysis, we assumed an immediate effect of ephedrine/caffeine. If an adverse effect of ephedrine/caffeine had delayed onset (e.g., if it were mediated through a hypertensive effect), we might not have captured it by our crossover analysis. However, there was nothing in our case-control analysis to suggest a delayed effect with continuous exposure.