Pervasive marketing by the alcohol industry and new products such as flavored vodkas or hard lemonade and iced tea may also be driving some of the increases among women and other demographics, said Jernigan.
The consequences for health care, well-being and mortality are severe. Excess drinking caused on average more than 88,000 deaths in the U.S. each year from 2006 to 2010, the Centers for Disease Control estimates—more than twice the number of deaths from prescription opioids and heroin last year. The total includes drunk-driving deaths and alcohol-linked violence, as well as liver disease, strokes and other medical conditions. The CDC says drinking too much is responsible for one in 10 deaths among working-age Americans.
The estimated cost of excess alcohol consumption is almost $250 billion a year in the U.S.
“We pay for all of it,” said Jürgen Rehm, senior director of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The costs show up in higher health-care needs, lost productivity and prosecuting alcohol-fueled crimes, from drunk driving to homicide.
Rehm said alcohol doesn’t command the attention of policymakers the way tobacco, illicit drugs or prescription opioids have. “The response of society should be commensurate to the level of the problem,” he said. Yet there is no national strategy in the U.S. that matches recent, high-profile efforts to combat opioids, smoking or illegal drugs. “Alcohol,” Rehm said, “we just tend to overlook.”
What can be done? Making alcohol more costly, through higher taxes or the setting of minimum prices, could reduce consumption, said William Kerr, senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group, a nonprofit research center primarily funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In Canada, putting a floor under prices was linked to reductions in alcohol-related hospital visits. Limiting availability—by restricting hours of sale or the number of liquor licenses, for example—would also reduce consumption, he added.
Additional medical screening could also identify people with risky drinking habits. That, however, would require a significant cultural shift in the U.S.
Americans tend to consider excess drinking a character flaw rather than a medical problem. Only about one-fifth of people who have reported alcohol abuse or dependency have ever been treated, previous research by Grant found. That compares with a treatment rate of about 60 percent for depression, she said.
“I think that there’s a lot of stigma still associated with it and people don’t want to talk to their doctors about it,” she said. “We haven’t done the job for alcohol that we’ve done with depression.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.