Does Anything Else Affect Humanity As Much?

As Alcoholism? Add it up… while the entire Science and Health Channel offers more about issues that affect the entire world at Veggie Chic.

“A recent British study noted that alcohol use accounted for 2 billion pounds ($3.3 billion U.S.) in lost wages each year, most of which resulted from work missed because of hangover. Alcohol costs in Canada amount to $7.5 billion each year, and $1.4 billion is lost each year because of decreased occupational productivity caused by hangover-like symptoms. Studies in other countries show similar estimates for the annual cost of alcohol ingestion: Australia, $3.8 billion; New Zealand, $331 million; and the United States, $148 billion.”

From the National Institute On Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse; The Estimated Costs of alcohol abuse in the United States for 1992 and 1998

I’m sorry if these graphics are skewed, they’re meant to be viewed side by side. Click through on the above link and you’ll be better able to read it.

With a hat tip to Green Facts comes the Global Status Report on Alcohol 2004 [pdf] published by the World Health Organization. While not getting into too much specific dollar costs it makes one particular statement I found very interesting;

“There is a strong interest in many countries regarding the development of scientifically valid, credible estimates of the economic costs of alcohol use (and use of other psychoactive substance use like tobacco and drugs). It is a well established fact that the use of alcohol entails a large number of adverse consequences in such widely differing areas as physical and mental health, traffic safety, violence, and labour productivity. There has been much effort in the past three decades in attempting to estimate these costs and recent investigations have suggested that they account annually for a substantial part of the Gross Domestic Product of industrialized countries (Klingemann & Gmel, 2001).”

Geesh – accounting annually for a substantial part of the Gross Domestic Product of industrialized countries? Good grief!

I haven’t been able to find what I set out for which is black and white facts that alcohol is the number one most economically costly substance to humanity. I believe that is true and I can’t offer anything that would be more defining towards affecting the world than that.