Alcohol: The World’s Top Killer

On February 11, 2011, the Reuters newswire and the World Health Organization (WHO) told us something that most addiction medicine physicians already suspected: Alcohol causes at least 4% of preventable deaths worldwide, now topping AIDS, tuberculosis, and violence. 

Anyway, the WHO report, The Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, indicated that alcohol abuse is particularly on the rise in Africa, India and parts of Asia, causing more incidents of drunk driving, alcohol-related disease, child abuse and neglect, job absenteeism and assaults. The reason? People in these areas are getting richer. They can afford more booze. And binge drinking has risen dramatically in Russia, the Ukraine, South Africa, Mexico and Kazakhstan; men have weekly heavy drinking episodes four times more often than women and engage in “hazardous activities” more often when they’re drunk.
Here’s a tidbit that American and European physicians already knew, too, but which the WHO validated in its report: alcohol is directly linked to more than 60 types of diseases like

• cancer (breast, brain, colorectal, larynx, liver)
  
• cirrhosis of the liver
• epilepsy
• dementia

Even though many Muslim countries restrict drinking – especially underage drinking – the influence of alcohol on health and criminal behavior is rising in these countries as well. “Yet not enough countries use effective policies to prevent death, disease and injury attributable to alcohol consumption,” said the WHO report. Interesting: The report’s talking about policies like raising taxes on alcohol, and not education and awareness campaigns to prevent alcohol-related death and injury, and not about the treatment of alcohol dependence and abuse.

Taxation: A Feasible Action?

How many rich folks would stop drinking if alcohol taxes were higher? It didn’t work with cigarettes any every part of the world, so why would it work with alcohol? And didn’t America’s own Leona Helmsley say that “only the little people pay taxes?” The number of homeless junkies on the streets of New York City pretty much closes the book on every addict’s certainty that if you want/need your drug, you’re gonna do whatever it takes to get it.

Since America has a never-increasing drug problem, telling other countries how to reduce alcohol-related deaths is a lot like Charlie Sheen’s recent sobriety advice given to Lindsay Lohan. If we stick to minding our own house, the US should take no comfort in the WHO’s report that the rest of the world is catching up with us. But one thing we’ve definitely got going for us is that our addiction recovery programs are second-to-none, explaining why so many non-US citizens either pattern their own programs on ours or actually come to our shores for treatment. Ask any American addict or addiction counselor: We know that raising taxes on alcohol and restricting marketing techniques to minors won’t do a damn thing to reduce over-consumption. Good luck with that.

This latest report is the WHO’s first since 2004, and it’s great to see that they’re at least examining the issue. About 2.5 million people die worldwide each year from alcohol-related causes, and the report says that it’s the leading cause of death for males ages 15 to 59. So, in the USA it’s probably a smart thing to do to pay attention to the WHO report rather than dismiss it under the “Ya THINK!” column. No matter how you look at the numbers, or what agency crunches them, alcohol has clearly become the number one killer in the world.