My last comment attempt vanished, but I would just point out that this statement: "If you took a Darvon a day and bought a Powerball ticket a day, you'd have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery than you would of dying from Darvon." may or may not be true, but isn't supported by the data.
The data say that there are about 111 deaths/year, and 2.3x10^7 prescriptions/year, giving about one death per 200,000 prescriptions. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery (from the website) are about 1 in 146,000,000. So if a Darvon scrip is for 30 days, you would still be quite a bit more likely to die after 30 days of Darvon than to win after 30 days of Powerball. :-)
(I suspect, though, that Jim's statement *is* correct, and that almost all the accidental deaths are due to accidental overdoses, not to taking "one Darvon per day", which would be a pretty small dose. See the previous comment about the small ratio between effective and toxic doses for this drug.)
Cat wrote, after quoting me: Ok, how'd Bosnia get in here? Because of The Dayton Agreement?
No, it got there through my error, of course... I meant to refer to the Kosovo War and the associated NATO/US bombing of Yugoslavia. Of course, the big ones were Korea, Vietnam, and (moving up the charts...) Iraq II, with Afghanistan and Iraq I a ways behind and the others even further.
The point still stands -- how did the US get out of the habit of declaring war when it goes to war?
Amusingly, the Wikipedia article on the Korean War mentioned that it was referred to as a "police action" due to some discomfort with the absence of a declaration of war. I wasn't alive during the Korean War, but the Vietnam War had occurred recently enough as I approached adulthood that I distinctly remember it being frequently referred to as an "undeclared" war.
Nowadays, it seems that the notion of an official declaration of war -- if mentioned at all -- is treated as a relic of yesteryear. No one has repealed the clause of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to declare war, but I'm not sure what exactly it means anymore.
Looking at these links, I'm reminded of the odd fact that December 1941 was the last time that the United States declared war. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq I, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq II -- billions of dollars spent, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands (quickly checks Wikipedia; make that millions) of others killed, but no declarations of war. (I'm sure I've left a few conflicts out...)
So: why not?
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