Addiction: Sales Estimates Paint Portraits of Alcohol Abusers – New York Times
Factoids from the New York Times on alchohol consumption:
- 17% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by underage drinkers
- rougly 20% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by problem drinkers (my calculation based on numbers given in the NYT).
- “people who begin drinking before age 15 are four times as likely to become dependent on alcohol as those who start after they turn 21.”
One thing the article does not mention is that underage and problem drinkers are probably not dropping big buck for the good stuff. That means that these percentages probably significantly understate the percentage of actual alchohol consumed by those groups since they are getting more alchohol per dollar than the connoisseur who may be spending a lot, but is buying 20 year-old single malt and fine wines.
The main issue that the article doesn’t raise at all is what this really means in terms of useful actionable information.
- Is the rate of consumption by underage drinkers historically high or low, which has great significance given item #3 and what that means for the future.
- Is this evidence that US laws are doing any good? Perhaps some comparison to countries without minimum drinking age laws would give some idea about whether or not our laws actually serve some useful purpose. As much as alchohol prohibition was a failure in the United States, rates of cirrhosis did decline, but only be levels similar to that achieved by Britain through taxation. Taxation is age-blind but perhaps other countries have better solutions (or worse problems?)
For the complete, albeit brief, article see Addiction: Sales Estimates Paint Portraits of Alcohol Abusers – New York Times
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