Despite more information than ever about alcoholism, DUIs and addiction in general, Americans are killing themselves with booze at rate not seen in the last 35 years.
The Washington Post reported this bit of Christmas cheer: last year more than 30,700 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes, including alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis, which is primarily caused by alcohol use.
That’s an increase of 37 percent since 2002.
And that tally doesn’t even include alcohol-induced fatalities, such as drunk-driving accidents and homicides. If those were included the annual toll would be closer to 90,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Alcoholism in recent years has been overshadowed by health experts focusing on the new wave of on overdose deaths from heroin and prescription painkillers. But in 2014, more people died from alcohol-induced causes (30,722) than from overdoses of prescription painkillers and heroin combined (28,647), according to the CDC.
There’s no secret to why these figures have gone up, said Philip J. Cook, a Duke University professor who studies alcohol consumption patterns and their effects: Per-capita alcohol consumption has been increasing since the late 1990s.
But Cook doesn’t take a swing at why more people are drinking. Is it the economic stress, longer work hours, advertising, football?
The School of Public Health at the University of West Virginia says people are coping with enormous amounts of stress in the modern age – stress the human body in its evolutionary past hasn't experienced.
“We live in trying times, and alcohol is seen as a way to alleviate our stress,” the school states on its web article, Why People Drink. “Self-medication for other problems carries over to alcohol ingestion. Alcohol can ease physical and emotional pain. If the person who consumes alcohol is also using medications for pain relief, the effects of alcohol can be intensified.”
To read the whole Washington Post story click here.
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