The impact of alcohol on global health is hard to encapsulate. In Never Enough: The Neuroscience of Addiction, author and neuroscientist Judith Grisel does her best to highlight the deadly consequences of excessive alcohol consumption:
Excessive use of alcohol now results in about 3.3 million deaths around the world each year. In Russia and its former satellite states, one in five male deaths is caused by drinking. And in the United States during the period between 2006 and 2010, excessive alcohol use was responsible for close to 90,000 deaths a year, including one in ten deaths among adults aged twenty to sixty-four, translating to 2.5 million years of potential life lost. More than half of these deaths and three-quarters of the years of potential life lost were due to binge drinking.
Alcohol use also substantially contributes to automobile accidents, domestic abuse, and other forms of violence. Roughly a third of all visits to emergency rooms for injuries in 2016 were alcohol related. Given all this, it is perhaps surprising that alcohol is only the second most lethal drug—trailing not opiates as one might suspect after reading almost any newspaper or magazine but the other legal substance: tobacco. In fact, alcohol killed about twice as many people in 2016 as prescription opioids and heroin overdoses combined, and even this number would be almost three times higher if it included drunk-driving-related deaths.
Alcohol’s low potency in the brain thus belies its disproportionate influence on human suffering: for a substantial minority (between 10 and 15 percent) and their communities, the consequences of alcohol addiction are devastating, and it’s the third-largest cause of preventable death. In fact, it’s partly because it is such a small and slippery drug, able to influence all sorts of neural systems, and so readily produced, that it has such tremendous influence.1 (emphasis added)
The most important word in this excerpt is preventable. The millions of deaths and other tragedies stemming from alcohol consumption are not inevitable. Rather, they are the summation of millions of individual choices. Choice implies alternatives—and the recognition that there are alternatives is the first step toward a different endpoint.
For more information, see the CDC’s Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the U.S. and Alcohol Use and Your Health.
