Alcohol ranks at the 9th place among risk factors in the most recent Global Burden of Disease (GBD) analysis. But this does not take into account the social problems, which fall outside the GBD analysis of death and disease.
However, alcohol burdens society beyond the individual effects to the user. Some of the ways in which alcohol burdens societies include:
- Decreased work productivity,
- Absenteeism,
- Increased morbidity and mortality,
- Increased stress upon health systems, and
- Damage to economies.
https://iogt.org/news/2019/11/24/who-new-report-about-alcohols-harms-to-others/
Australia: This includes an array of negative experiences, including generalized issues such as fear and disruption due to strangers’ drinking, and more specific, concrete harms such as violence, neglect or damage to property. The cost of harms experienced by someone other than the drinker has been estimated at over AU$6 billion per year (Laslett et al. 2010).
