Perhaps it is just a legend that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

But while the rest of us are all fired up over an epidemic of narcotics — drawn into the red-hot debate about legalizing marijuana or launching flaming arrows of rhetoric at one another about the "disease concept" of addiction — the alcohol industry lurks offstage dancing to a happy tune because its product seems impervious to public scrutiny these days.

At least the feds are paying attention. Well, sort of.

"Alcohol is responsible for about 88,000 deaths in the U.S. each year," according to a just-released government report on the toll of excessive drinking. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that fatalities caused by drunken drivers and more than 50 other alcohol-related causes wipe out about 2.5 million years of potential life each year.

88,000. That's people who were alive in 2012 but were dead a year later because they drank too much or somebody else did. You don't know one of the dead? Then consider this: We're not yet a quarter of the way through 2014, and with plenty of booze yet to consume, there are thousands of people right now who will be gone before year's end — maybe even somebody you need or love in your life.

88,000.

Meantime, Philip Seymour Hoffman dies with a needle in his arm and a swelling cacophony has us arguing about what to do about opiates, addiction as a chronic illness, relapse and whether the Oscar-winning actor deserved what he got. Almost a perverse afterthought was the headline-grabbing raid by New York police on the small-time heroin dealers in Hoffman's neighborhood, plying their trade next door to the bars and convenience stores selling a drug more lethal than his.

88,000.

Meantime, Mexican police made front-page news by finally killing a notorious leader of a violent drug cartel, this time for real. (Until they got him in a shootout, they thought they'd killed him four years ago.) Proof, argue the Mexican and American governments, of another tangible dividend in the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on a "war on drugs" we'll never win.

88,000.

Meantime, early returns from Colorado show that so much marijuana was smoked in the first month since it became legal this year that the state has already collected $2 million in taxes and is on pace to pocket $100 million this year. Yet I find it notable that this successful taxation of marijuana hasn't spurred legislators to take a closer look at alcohol, which generated only $40 million in taxes last year. After all, the state's tax rate on alcohol sales and consumption is among the lowest in the nation. Why is it that it was so easy to get the public and the policymakers in Colorado to agree to a bevy of new taxes on the state's newest legal drug but any hint at upping the tax ante for the most used and abused substance, alcohol, elicits a veiled warning from the Beer Institute? The institute recently said, "Taxes are the single most expensive ingredient in beer, costing more than the labor and raw materials combined." That's dead wrong, though. The costliest ingredient in beer is what it does to people who drink too much of it.

88,000.

Meantime, though mine is an inexact survey, a quick glance on the Internet found that the CDC report caused barely a blip among major news outlets. In my hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the story was all of three paragraphs buried near the back of the local section. That same week, I tallied the paper's stories of trauma and heartache and crime and punishment resulting from alcohol use. Total: 22.

The stories include a few who now join the ranks of the 88,000. But except for the CDC, who's counting and who cares? Not the rest of us.

William Moyers is the vice president of public affairs and community relations for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the author of "Broken," his best-selling memoirs. His book "Now What? An Insider's Guide to Addiction and Recovery" was published last year. Please send your questions to William Moyers at [email protected]. To find out more about William Moyers and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.