Posts Tagged ‘deaths’
“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life”*…
Alcohol consumption in the U.S has been trending down for several years; in 2018, alcohol consumption in the United States dropped for the third-straight year. Nevertheless…
America is in the middle of an alcohol epidemic.
That’s one takeaway from a new study published this month in Alcoholism, which found the number of alcohol-related deaths more than doubled between 1999 and 2017 from nearly 36,000 to nearly 73,000, and the rate of alcohol-related deaths rose by more than 50 percent from 16.9 per 100,000 people to 25.5.
To put that in perspective, there were roughly 70,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2017. Based on the Alcoholism study, alcohol was linked to more deaths than all overdoses — even at the height of America’s opioid epidemic. Alcohol accounted for 2.6 percent of all deaths among people 16 and older in 2017, up from 1.5 percent in 1999…
The study speaks to a problem in American public health and drug policy: While crises like the opioid epidemic (deservedly) get a lot of attention, even deadlier drug crises are often neglected by the public, policymakers, and media…
Alcohol isn’t even the deadliest drug. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously estimated that tobacco smoking is linked to 480,000 deaths each year, or roughly 1 in 5 deaths. In other words, preventing just 30 percent of smoking deaths would prevent more deaths than preventing all drug overdose deaths and alcohol-related deaths combined.
Yet alcohol and tobacco haven’t filled a big part of public discussions about drugs in the past few years, especially compared to the opioid epidemic…
More at “The number of US alcohol deaths per year has doubled since 1999.”
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we contemplate cocktails, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912, during the First International Opium Conference at The Hague, that the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention, was signed.
Opium article from The Daily Picayune, February 24, 1912, New Orleans
“Remembrance and reflection how allied!”*…
Via @christhebarker, an update of an iconic photo collage… what a year. (Larger here)
* Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
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As we count the days, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Naguib Mahfouz; he was born on this date in 1911. A prolific writer– he published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career– he was one of the first writers in Arabic to explore Existentialist themes (e.g., the Cairo Trilogy, Adrift on the Nile). He was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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