This considers only the economic burden to others associated with the legal, regulated drug — alcohol:
Our cost estimates suggest that the burden to others from drinking is of the same general magnitude as the burden that drinkers impose on themselves and on response agencies serving them. This distinguishes alcohol from tobacco, where the burden of health harm to the smoker is much greater than the burden of secondhand smoke (Greenhaugh et al., 2020). It makes a strong case for an active role of governments in reducing burdens that drinking causes to nondrinkers or bystanders, including active intervention in alcohol markets to reduce these externalities.
Jiang, H., Doran, C. M., Room, R., Chikritzhs, T., Ferris, J., & Laslett, A. M. (2022). Beyond the Drinker: Alcohol’s Hidden Costs in 2016 in Australia. Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs, 83(4), 512–524.
First thought — I’m not a fan of the language “impose on themselves.” That might be fair for most drinkers, but its placement of the problem in the drinker rather than an illness would not be fair to people with alcohol addiction (alcoholism).
Second thought — Not only does it not consider the non-economic burden experienced by families and communities, it doesn’t even consider all the economic costs:
Moreover, many costs of adverse effects of drinking on children were not measured: nongovernmental costs were not included, and neither were government costs other than child protection services. Furthermore, because of data unavailability, the costs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, miscarriage, stillbirth, and underweight birth and the costs of research and public prevention initiatives, of police and criminal services, and of suffering from separation or divorce attributable to others’ drinking were not included in our study.
Jiang, H., Doran, C. M., Room, R., Chikritzhs, T., Ferris, J., & Laslett, A. M. (2022). Beyond the Drinker: Alcohol’s Hidden Costs in 2016 in Australia. Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs, 83(4), 512–524.
[Photo Credit: JulieMcDuffie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
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