Here's the evidence base:

"Prescription drug deaths double in a decade

Deaths from adverse reactions to prescription drugs have more than doubled in 10 years, new figures show. Statistics from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) reveal 973 people died from suspected serious side-effects last year, compared to 382 in 1996. The MHRA figures also show there were 9,801 cases between May and December last year of patients having a serious, suspected adverse reaction to the drugs they were prescribed."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/22/nhs222.xml

These are only the recorded cases! In the U.S., the situation is also desperate.

Another estimate:

"Prescription drugs linked to 15,000 deaths each year

By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor

DRUGS prescribed to patients for a range of conditions may be responsible for as many as 1,200 sudden deaths a year in Britain. Antibiotics, antipsychotic drugs and those used to treat nausea and vomiting may all be involved because they have the ability to interfere with the electrical activity that controls the heartbeat.

The alarm was sounded by a study in the Netherlands that found that patients taking these drugs had nearly three times the risk of sudden cardiac death. The authors estimate that the drugs cause 320 deaths a year in the Netherlands. By extrapolation, that equates to 1,200 deaths a year in Britain and 15,000 deaths in Europe and the US as a whole.

The Dutch study, published in European Heart Journal, looked at all deaths between 1995 and 2003 in a population of half a million people from 150 general practices nationally for whom complete medical records are kept. "

The vociferous and powerful minority lobby that wants to ban homeopathy should perhaps turn its energy and attentions to rather more urgent matters. In their saner moments, they might concede that homeopathy cannot ever wreak such havoc and mayhem. They might even open their minds to the massive scale of positive outcomes after homeopathic treament. There again, we live in a far-from-perfect world.