The Economic Cost of Excessive Alcohol Consumption

In the United States annually, excessive alcohol consumption accounts for an average of 79,000 deaths and 2.3 million years of potential life lost, making it the third-leading preventable cause of death in the country. This serious public health problem carries a heavy economic burden and causes a number of adverse health and social consequences, including premature death, increases in disease and injury, property damage from fire and motor vehicle crashes, alcohol-related crime, and lost productivity.


In 1998, researchers estimated that excessive alcohol consumption cost the United States $184.6 billion each year. According to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the cost of excessive alcohol consumption grew to 223.5 billion in 2006, with binge drinking accounting for over 75% of the total economic cost of excessive drinking.

What did they do?

Researchers Ellen E. Bouchery, Henrick J. Harwood, Jeffery J. Sacks, Carol J. Simon, and Robert D. Brewer followed the United States Public Health Service Guidelines to calculate the economic cost of excessive alcohol consumption in 2006. This method approximates the amount of direct and indirect national costs for health care, crime, mortality, morbidity-related productivity, and other expenses that can be associated with a specific behavior or health problem. Since this method does not include costs related to pain and suffering, researchers believe the estimates may be significantly lower than they would be if these intangible costs were taken into consideration.

To estimate the economic costs of a selection of impacts and consequences related to excessive alcohol consumption, researchers gathered information from a variety of effective and consistent national databases. Data included the costs of health care, productivity losses, property damage due to crimes, motor vehicle crashes and fire dam- age, the criminal justice system, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)-related special education, and numerous other consequences.

After identifying the total costs, they explored what percentage of these costs could be attributed to particular alcohol consumption behaviors, such as binge drinking, underage drinking, and drinking while pregnant. In addition, they identified the most costly alcohol-attributable crimes, calculated the average economic cost for each alcohol drink consumed, and determined who in society bears the most cost as it relates to excessive drinking.


What did they find?


In 2006, the estimated total economic cost of excessive alcohol consumption in the United States amounted to $223.5 billion or $1.90 per drink, which equals about $746 for each man, woman, and child on a per capita basis. Of the $223.5 billion, $161.3 billion (72.3%) represent costs from lost productivity. Of this $161.3 billion, the two greatest losses came from impaired productivity at work (45.9%) and lost productivity due to the 83,180 alcohol-related deaths (40.3%).

Within the $24.6 billion (11.0%) estimate due to increased healthcare costs, the largest expenditures came from specialty treatment for alcohol abuse and dependence (43.4%) and hospitalizations from excessive drinking medical conditions (20.8%). The biggest cost from other effects comes from criminal justice system costs, totaling $21 billion, due to crimes that are not considered mainly alcohol-attributable, such as assault versus drinking and driving. The cost of motor vehicle crashes also accounted for a significant percentage of the total cost related to other effects ($14 billion in total).

Of the total economic costs of excessive drinking, binge drinking amounts to $170.7 billion (76.4%), underage drinking equals $27.0 billion (12.1%), drinking while pregnant represents $5.2 billion, or 2.3% (mostly related to FAS), and the costs of crime come to $73.3 billion (9.2%). The federal, state, and local government bear these economic costs ($94.2 billion) along with excessive drinkers and their families ($92.9 billion), with the government bearing most of the costs for healthcare expenditures and excessive drinkers and their families covering productivity losses.


What Coalitions Can Do

• Implement effective interventions In order to reduce excessive alcohol consumption, coalitions need to ensure they are combining policies with interventions targeting individual behaviors. Coalitions should implement a comprehensive set of interventions addressing the seven behavior change strategies, such as increasing alcohol excise taxes, limiting alcohol outlet density, enforcing the minimum legal drinking age, screening and counseling for alcohol misuse, and sobriety checkpoints for alcohol-impaired driving.

• Target specific drinking patterns and risk groups According to the research, binge drinking accounted for almost three- quarters of the economic costs. Coalitions should continuously keep a current pulse on their local data and what it tells them about the specific groups in their community engaging in excessive drinking and the associated behaviors and costs to the community. With this information, as well as information on root causes and local conditions associated with the behaviors, coalitions can develop an effective and efficient strategic plan of action.

•  Demonstrate to policymakers the economic costs to the community To gain support from policymakers for environmental policies that fit your local conditions, coalitions will need to demonstrate the economic burden of excessive alcohol drinking on their community. Coalitions should adapt the data presented in this article to their own community. For instance, one can easily figure the total economic cost by multiplying the population of a community by the $746 of excessive alcohol consumption per capita basis for every man, woman, and child.

To review the original source, please refer to:

Bouchery, E.E., Harwood, H.J., Sacks, J.J., Simon, C.J., & Brewer, R.D. (2011). Economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in the U.S., 2006. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 41:516-524.

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