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Alcohol Causes One In 20 Deaths Worldwide, Says WHO (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Alcohol is responsible for more than 5% of all deaths worldwide, or around 3 million a year, new figures have revealed. The data, part of a report from the World Health Organization, shows that about 2.3 million of those deaths in 2016 were of men, and that almost 29% of all alcohol-caused deaths were down to injuries -- including traffic accidents and suicide. The report, which comes out every four years, reveals the continued impact of alcohol on public health around the world, and highlights that the young bear the brunt: 13.5% of deaths among people in their 20s are linked to booze, with alcohol responsible for 7.2% of premature deaths overall. It also stresses that harm from drinking is greater among poorer consumers than wealthier ones. While the proportion of deaths worldwide that have been linked to alcohol has fallen to 5.3% since 2012, when the figure was at 5.9%, experts say the findings make for sobering reading.
the rate of death attributed to alcohol has been falling since 2012. Sounds like a better trend to me.
95% chance you won't die from alcohol.
The glass may be half empty but the bottle is half full.
Alcohol may cause 1 in 20 deaths, but it probably play a part in about 1 in 20 conceptions, so overall its a zero-sum game
To be fair, it is the number one way to screw up your life. And if not the number one, it's in the top two. This drug is widely available, people self-medicate with it because it has social blessing, it's advertised everywhere and yes, there's even a word for abusing it that's in common parlance -- alcoholism. It's not just the deaths it's the messed second, third and fourth order consequences.
Let me give a simple example: alcohol abuse makes you a lousy parent.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
List of causes of death by rate
I think that there are more pressing causes of death, which might increase the need for a drink.
Undid some funny moderation, because I think there are a couple of people worldwide who like to use every opportunity to ban alcohol, even though it is not really a leading cause of death worldwide.
It's a poor mechanism for population control. It kills those in their 20s disproportionately often. This means the resources used to raise and educate these people are wasted since they died before they could make a sufficient contribution. A more cost efficient mechanism would target those past retirement or the very young or ideally prevent conception in the first place. As others have pointed out, alcohol may even increase the number of unplanned pregnancies, making the overpopulation problem worse.
It kills those in their 20s disproportionately often because those in their 20s tend to die rarely from cardiac arrest, cancer or a stroke.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The number one way to screw up your life is having sex. From STDs to pregnancies to rape allegations...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And yet 19 out of 20 people manage to live responsibly and not kill themselves. Did anybody question how many of those people enjoy a little alcohol in moderation without becoming fuckwits?
It's basically pointing out that some people can't control themselves, and that some people are just fucking awful parents who failed to introduce their offspring to drinking, partying and enjoying life in a controlled manner, leaving them to "break free" and binge out, to their own detriment.
Why blame the alcohol? Oh right, cos nobody wants to ever have to have personal responsibility. It must be something else what caused it sir.
Let's say for whatever reason, opium and alcohol switch places historically and instead of alcohol being the dominant legal drug, opium derivatives become legal.
Like alcohol, the dominant forms of opiates that remain legal are low-concentrate varieties, such as smoking opium or low-strength tinctures -- in the same way that beer and wine are popular, although like spirits, morphine or heroin also exist, but are consumed mostly diluted cocktail style. For the most part, opium is sold in regulated stores and always in well-known concentrations by a well-regulated industry.
Society has recognized for centuries the problems of opium use, but as its deeply ingrained in culture only the US ever tried to ban it during Prohibition which was a complete failure. Alcohol is seen as much worse, and society is presently engaged in a "alcohol crisis" fueled by over-prescription of therapeutic alcohol and black-market alcohol which is tainted.
Would we more or less be in the same place we are now, kind of turning a blind eye to the dangers of opium -- relying mostly on the culturally ingrained "rules" for to not overdose regularly?
It seems to me that most people ignore the large-scale problems with alcohol availability and despite cultural acceptance it's probably way more dangerous than we ever consider. Millions of people are alcoholics and millions more are borderline functional alcoholics and there are vast social problems associated with alcohol, like drunk driving, violence, domestic abuse, etc.
I think there have been attempts to quantify the risks associated with the various varieties of psychoactive substances and almost always alcohol and tobacco come out 1 or 2 with opiates further down the list maybe behind barbiturates, which society mostly has avoided as a long-term crisis or black market drug.
The latter is kind of interesting considering the popularity of Seconal and Quaaludes in the late 1960s and 1970s -- it's somewhat surprising that with the surge in illciit lab-made fentanyl and other "research chemicals" that there hasn't been a parallel surge in illicit lab-made Quaaludes or Seconal.
Bad comparison. Countries have tried restricting both firearms and alcohol. We know that banning alcohol goes badly in general (e.g. US prohibition, Islamic countries today). In contrast, over the last 50 years, many countries have substantially increased restrictions on firearms (the UK, Canada, and Australia), and we haven't seen the same problems from alcohol prohibition. Addictive substances built into culture are very different than weapons. There are some decent potential arguments for few restrictions on firearms(e.g. right of self-defense), but a comparison to alcohol empirically doesn't work.