The Drinking Drag on Health-Care Costs

by James W. Skillen

The social cost for underage drinking is $53 billion a year, including $19 billion for traffic crashes alone," according to Richard J. Bonnie, chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. The federal government "spends 25 times more on preventing illicit drugs than on preventing illicit drinking by young people," said Dr. Bonnie (The Washington Post, 9/10/03).

 

Bonnie made these statements in conjunction with the release of an academy report that uses exceptionally strong language to criticize our society's handling of teen drinking and to call for new measures to control it. Yet teen drinking is only one of the factors adding to spiraling social and health-care costs. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop once pointed out that alcohol abuse, tobacco use, and obesity are the major causes of medical expenditures.

 

One may criticize the report's findings and recommendations. Yet the high social cost of teen drinking should force us to stop and think about what is going on in our homes and schools and on the highways. The report seems justified in arguing that a public campaign against teen drinking should be put "on the same footing as the war against teenage smoking."

 

Nevertheless, the troubling thing to me as I read the news report about the release of the academy's study is how its recommendations focus on public policy changes that almost ignore the real causes of teen drinking. The study calls for higher beer taxes, "harsh penalties on stores that sell alcohol to teenagers" and new curbs on "glamorous references to alcohol in hip-hop music and movies." The study's projected three percent decrease in alcohol sales resulting from a 10 percent increase in the beer tax seems almost insignificant.

 

Are we to believe that teenage drinking is caused primarily by its glamour treatment in pop music and movies and because liquor store managers are too quick to let teens buy the stuff? Why are teenagers trying to get drunk or willing to take risks on the road? What are they learning at school about the meaning and value of their lives? Do they experience love at home?

 

My questions are not intended to suggest that public policies make no difference. That would be odd coming from me. But the National Academy of Sciences and state and federal governments do not face teen drinking in the abstract or connected only to hip-hop music and liquor sales. Teens have parents or guardians, attend schools, and live in communities. If public policy is to make any difference in this arena, it has to deal realistically with parents and homes, schools and communities as well as with the media and commerce.

 

Most important in all of this, however, is what parents, teachers, and close friends do. To be sure, it would be a big help if public policy were to give parents greater freedom to choose schools for their children and thereby to be more involved in the nurturing of their children. The Center for Public justice is working for that reform. But public policy can go only so far. How are you loving your children today? Does it include ample time for growing up with them and getting to know their friends? Does it include tough love? Does it include showing them how much God loves them? Health care, social well-being, and justice begin at home—with love.