A hat tip to Healing Imperfectly for bringing to my attention the recent Time Magazine article that asks Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers? The study that suggests that heavy drinkers outlive abstainers has been widely promoted on the net as proof that drinking is “good” for you. Not to rain on the parade of alcohol advocates by pointing out the obvious pitfalls of statistics, I say let those that so crave justification for their actions have it- but I would like to see Time do a follow up question.
How much harm do these heavy drinkers inflict upon society during their lengthy tenure?
I’ll start you out with a short list:
• Alcohol availability is closely related to violent assaults. Communities and neighborhoods that have more bars and liquor stores per capita experience more assaults.
• Alcohol use is frequently associated with violence between intimate partners. Two-thirds of victims of intimate partner violence reported that alcohol was involved in the incident.
• In one study of interpersonal violence, men had been drinking in an estimated 45 percent of cases and women had been drinking in 20 percent of cases.
• Women whose partners abused alcohol were 3.6 times more likely than other women to be assaulted by their partners.
• In 1997, 40 percent of convicted rape and sexual assault offenders said that they were drinking at the time of their crime.
• In 2002, more than 70,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 were victims of alcohol-related sexual assault in the U.S.
• In those violent incidents recorded by the police in which alcohol was a factor, about nine percent of the offenders and nearly 14 percent of the victims were under age 21.
• Twenty-eight percent of suicides by children ages nine to 15 were attributable to alcohol.
• An estimated 480,000 children are mistreated each year by a caretaker with alcohol problems.
The numbers just get worse when you look into the percentage of all violent crime, incarceration, accidents, and health care costs. What may even be a better question is the abstinence-what-if of all of this issue. What if the father wasn’t an abusive drunk, what if the wife wasn’t killed by a drunk driver, what if the student would have stayed in school; What if they all lived a much better life, would it matter if a minor, limited study of dubious merit concluded it was slightly shorter?
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