A coalition of provincial, national and international addictions agencies has sponsored a series of symposia leading to the developing of international guidelines for estimating the costs of substance abuse. These guidelines have now been used in national studies in four continents, with more consistent and comparable results than in previous studies. Although the bottom-line results have been used to argue for alcohol and drug issues having a higher place on the public policy agenda, the real value in such studies lies in the detailed results regarding mortality and morbidity attributable to substance abuse, the relative contribution of acute versus chronic conditions to overall problem levels and the role of substance misuse in adverse social consequences, such as crime and economic productivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis presentation describes a recently developed set of guidelines for estimating the economic costs of substance abuse, summarizes the findings from a Canadian study that utilized these guidelines, and discusses the implications to the potential development of guidelines for estimating the costs and benefits of gambling. The guidelines for estimating the costs of substance abuse present a general framework of costs to be included and discuss methodological issues such as the definition of abuse; determination of causality; comparison of the demographic and human capital approaches; the treatment of private costs; the treatment of nonworkforce mortality and morbidity; the treatment of research, education, law enforcement costs, the estimation of avoidable costs and budgetary impact of substance abuse, and the significance of intangible costs. Utilizing these guidelines, a study was undertaken to estimate the economic costs of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs to Canadian society in 1992.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo key methodological issues underlying different methods for calculating estimates of the number of alcohol-caused deaths are identified and recommendations suggested for future work. 1. How to adjust alcohol aetiologic fractions across time and place to reflect different levels of risky drinking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHarm-reduction programs, first developed in an attempt to mitigate the adverse consequences of illicit drug use, can be applied to alcohol-prevention programs as well. In fact, the movement toward harm reduction in illicit drug prevention may be closely paralleled by a similar trend in the alcohol-prevention field. Harm-reduction approaches to alcohol aim to diminish the negative consequences of intoxication (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF