Let’s say that, on any given day, 488 people in the United States who drive a specific brand of car die.
Or let’s say that 488 people in the United States who use the same brand of toothpaste die each and every single day.
If 488 people died everyday in the nation, and the one causal link was that they all used the same over the counter brand of aspirin, don’t you think the federal government might think about stepping in and doing something?
Well, that’s exactly what’s happening in our country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A CDC report from February indicates that an estimated 178,000 Americans died due to exposure to a single consumer product from 2020 through 2021 — alcohol.
It’s a monumental uptick from the alcohol-related death numbers from 2016. Over that period, the number of alcohol-related deaths for men increased by 27% and the number of alcohol-related deaths for women increased by 35%.
And the alcohol-related deaths are skewing younger and younger.
To put things in perspective, the CDC logged about 80,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2021 — and we all know what kind of moral, political and legislative hysteria those data points have wrought.
Yet at the very same time we’re bemoaning and lamenting opioid deaths, there’s a perfectly legal substance that’s apparently killing 100,000 MORE people each year in this country.
And NOBODY seems to care.
Is it because one substance is nominally illegal and the other is nominally legal? As in, the inherent tragedy of a person being killed in a car crash is somehow WORSE if the driver was gonked out of their gourd on Oxycontin instead of Budweiser?
How many stories do you see in the media on a daily basis framing the opioid crisis as a modern-day boogeyman? You really can’t go a week without hearing or reading or watching something about a fentanyl overdose death or some sad story about someone ruining their life because they got addicted to pain pills.
But when was the last time you saw a news story about the negative impacts of alcohol on society at large? The National Institutes of Health reported that in 2022, an estimated 29.5 million Americans met the criteria for alcohol use disorder.
To put that in perspective, it’s nearly three times the population of Georgia as a whole.
But I can’t even remember the last time I saw some sort of alarmist, maudlin TV special about the abused children of alcoholics. Or how binge drinking ruins people’s careers. Or just how heavy a toll alcohol-related illnesses take on the American healthcare industry (and by default, American taxpayers).
Call me cynical, but do you think the fact that alcohol manufacturers buy a lot of TV commercial time and advertising space might have something to do with the radically different cultural interpretations here?
Per the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States — bet you didn’t know that lobby existed, did you? — spirits supplier sales hit $37.7 billion ALONE in the U.S. in 2023. And alcohol manufacturers ain’t the only people getting rich here; per the Urban Institute, government entities across the board received more than $7 billion in alcohol-related taxes in 2020.
And if you DON’T think that governments are in bed with the alcohol industry and have a vested interest in keeping sales afloat, just remember this: More than 20 states in America actually have GOVERNMENT-OWNED liquor stores, which combined for more than $11 billion in revenues in ‘20 alone.
And since COVID, local, state and federal governments have done pretty much everything except lower the age to buy alcohol to help stimulate beverage sales. Even here in the Bible Belt, we’ve seen open-container entertainment zone and packaged wine home delivery ordinances sprout up all over the place. And if you think all of these “brunch bills” and “specialty shop” revisions don’t have anything to do with local governments increasing their tax base — well, you must be drinking.
Never mind that alcohol kills nearly twice as many people as narcotics — as a conservative estimate. You can’t watch a football game without being bombarded by an endless parade of pro-pilsner propaganda; instead of being posited as a public health scourge, it’s touted as Americana itself.
And if you’re making the right people enough money, I guess you can work your way around bad publicity. Remember when the COVID vaccine first came out and a buncha’ lunkheads on Facebook said it would turn you magnetic?
Well, around that same time, ACTUAL scientific studies in the American Journal of Medical Genetics found extensive evidence that chronic alcohol abuse not only damages DNA, but can actually mutate it.
Huh. You’d think a story like that would be much, much bigger news considering the ubiquity of the product in our society.
But then again, considering how much money the alcohol industry makes for retailers, restaurants, the media and government itself — maybe the curious silence is on purpose.