Why alcohol is still the most dangerous drug
“It’s cheaper, legal and kills more people than opioids. But public officials are much more united in the fight against drugs than alcohol.” - GOVERNING
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Alcohol: 88,000 deaths per year. Cigarettes/nicotine: 480,000 deaths per year. Standard American Diet and lack of exercise: 678,000 deaths per year. I know which one shows up most in my church’s Wednesday evening “organ recitals” of ailments.
Or, put in terms of lethality per user, we get about a million new tobacco users each year, so tobacco probably kills about 65% of those who use it. For alcohol, about three million new users each year, for an overall lethality rate of about 3%. For SAD, about 3-4 million new users each year, for an overall lethality of about 22%.
Most dangerous drug? Not by a long shot.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
It’s the start of another discussion about … alcohol.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
I see more Christians killing themselves with food than anything else. (See Bert’s stats above.)
Judgment must begin in the house of God–and behind the pulpit.
Now get off my lawn!
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
On that note, I went for a 10-mile bike ride yesterday, and will jog three miles tomorrow morning.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
One side note here is that we might want to be careful about talking of judgment. I’ve seen from a number of sources—Ted Roberts’s work on sexual addiction, Diane Langberg’s work on sexual abuse, etc..—that one of the biggest things impeding people getting help in any area is how dangerous it is to “come out” as someone needing help.
And, speaking dead seriously but with a grain of humor, many pastors whose belts are, or were, the proverbial “fence on a graveyard for fried chicken” have a huge advantage in this because it is socially acceptable to admit vulnerability in this area. Want to deal with the (very real) scourge of alcohol abuse as well? Simply point out that drunkenness is simply gluttony for liquor; “hey, I don’t understand whiskey very well, but I do understand putting more food in my mouth than I need to, and that there are reasons for doing that….”
(my experience is not pastoral, but I remember being shocked at what factory line workers would tell me about their personal lives when I approached them for help solving quality problems….as soon as they figured out I was working to help them and wasn’t carrying a pink slip, I’d not only get the information needed to fix the quality problem, but would also learn about their family, hobbies, their dog…..it was amazing….and I’d guess pastors can do it, too)
(I’m reading through Roberts’s Pure Desire, and while part of me is wondering “how effective can he really be—when does the other shoe drop?”, another side of me is thinking “within my theological differences with him, what can we do to adopt what he’s doing to help men?”. I’m not quite sure I understand completely what he’s getting at despite having read through the book three times…)
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I think this topic may be DOA.
I’ll always remember the 400 pound pastor I knew personally who preached sermons denouncing cigarettes and beer drinking. He dropped dead at 41!
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
The defensiveness that results from any information critical of alcohol is quite revealing.
Note that this article didn’t come from fundamentalist teetotalers. It’s Governing magazine. Interesting that secular writers are more willing to face facts about alcohol than some Christians are. Very interesting.
Anyone with a sliver of objectivity can see that responding to evidence of harm with “Yeah, but there are even deadlier things!!!” is silly. The existence of even more harmful/risky things than A does not make A safer or healthier.
From the article…
But the fact is that alcohol kills roughly 88,000 Americans each year, more than double the number of opioid deaths. Almost half of alcohol fatalities come from chronic health problems attributed to excessive alcohol consumption, such as liver cirrhosis, breast cancer and heart disease. Those alcohol-induced deaths are on the rise. Excluding certain acute causes, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths increased by about 47 percent between 1999 and 2015.
Public health specialists say it’s time for a broader national dialogue about substance misuse, one that includes alcohol. “There continues to be a [reluctance to accept that] alcohol is an addictive substance because it’s legal, because it’s widely used, because people believe that unless it’s a drunk driving accident you don’t really die from it,” says Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudoun County, Va., Board of Supervisors and a former mental health therapist who worked for 15 years treating offenders with substance abuse problems in an adult detention center.
The recent increase in alcohol-related deaths from chronic health problems is part of a new picture emerging about alcohol’s negative impacts on American life.
…
As more women drink, and the frequency and volume of the drinking increases, so does the risk of expectant mothers unintentionally exposing their fetus to alcohol and harming the child’s brain development. About 1 in 10 pregnant women in the U.S. report having had at least one alcoholic beverage in the past 30 days, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On and on it goes. The truth is not going to go away however much people say “Yeah, but this other thing is worse.”
Of course the author isn’t arguing for total abstinence. Nor am I, at this moment. The facts in the piece are powerful all by themselves. Wise people will draw wise conclusions.
That’s all I’ll say about it.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Being fat doesn’t cause others to die. Being drunk or high and behind the wheel causes others to die. Self-inflected causes of death are one thing, innocents dying are another.
http://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-alcohol-abuse…
Agreed: drinking and driving (and piloting a plane, at the helm of a boat) is dangerous and should absolutely be eschewed.
Having a glass of wine with dinner - OK
Aaron, it’s not the facts of the article to which I object. It’s the abject false claim that alcohol is the most dangerous drug out there. The reality is that the most dangerous drug out there is nicotine (as administered in tobacco) by a wide, wide margin. Moreover, if you scale things by the relative risk—deaths per user—opioids are also far more dangerous.
I have no problems with honest arguments which factually address real problems, but I do have problems with false arguments that conflate lawful, Biblical pleasures with deadly hazards, especially when fundamentalists are by and large refusing to deal with hazards that are far more deadly to them.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I agree that to say that because other lifestyle choices also cause health problems we can disregard or down-play the negative impact of alcohol. As Aaron said, “The truth is not going away however much people say ‘Yeah, but … .’”
Earlier this year there was a study published by the National Health Service in Scotland saying alcohol causes cancer, causes thousands of injuries, and many other negative health issues. The World Health Organization lists alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, similar to asbestos and arsenic. According to the WHO, “There is sufficient evidence for the carcinogenicity of alcoholic beverages in humans. …Alcoholic beverages at any quantity are carcinogenic to humans (Group 1).”
Mr. Obese Hard-Core Fundy Pastor these groups are not.
Yeah, but … . Right??? :-)!
Recently my two young sons asked me about alcohol. I told them that while the Bible does not say “Thou shalt not drink alcohol,” I do believe it comes very, very - very close to it. I told them I felt it was not wise, that I have absolutely no desire to drink, and I can’t think of a good reason why I would want to drink anyway. I will continue to teach them about the negative effects of alcohol and what I believe to be Biblical wisdom of avoiding it.
If someone else feels differently, that is between them and the Lord.
That said, I do find it interesting that many Christians do not seem to discuss or argue for drinking in an honest manner.
Yeah, but …
My best DUI arrest was for a group of sailors who were zipping around on a zodiac boat, drunk. One guy fell overboard and, when his friends circled around to pick him up, they accidentally run over him in their drunken state and chopped his arm into roast beef with the propeller.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
If we want to talk about dishonest arguments, let’s start with the article, whose title is an outright falsehood, and which conflates all drinking with drunkenness. For that matter, let’s continue and call out the WHO and NHS, which make the second mistake as well. If you want to talk about something causing cancer, drunkenness scores pretty high; moderate drinking not very high at all. Moreover, if you want to get rid of something in your diet that causes about 3-5 times more cancer than does alcohol, you can eliminate red meat, especially cured meats.
I will not be holding my breath for a sermon on the evils of “demon bacon”, to put it mildly, but precisely that ought to be the result of a consistent concern for my health if it’s important enough to demonize moderate consumption of wine.
And really, that’s the point of bringing up food in these discussions. If the health effects of wine, and not the actual Biblical proscriptions of drunkenness, merit bringing the subject up in forii like this, then we can say the exact same thing about the health effects of our food. Or whether or not we use sunscreen, or whether or not we use seatbelts, or whether or not we are using 15 passenger vans.
It is not a dodge at all, but a direct response to the actual line of reasoning. If you’re going to argue against alcohol primarily because of health effects, then it is entirely appropriate to ask why we’re not addressing far bigger health effects due to things like diet and tobacco. The answer, really, is that in large portions of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, wine is a “whipping boy” that is appropriate to attack, and bacon and hamburgers are not.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I grew up in a home with a father who was an alcoholic and relatives who were as well. While my Dad did provide for us, he had brothers and cousins whose families lived in abject poverty while the men drank anything that had alcohol in it, including sterno. I’ve seen it first hand and articles like this don’t come close to describing the damage alcoholism causes.
Perhaps what sets some of us off is the implication that drinking alcohol equates to alcoholism. That implication makes no more sense than saying that eating fried chicken is gluttony. The other thing is that our churches don’t have many members who are practicing the sin of drunkenness but have too many who are sinfully abusing the temple of God with dietary gluttony while preachers denounce alcoholism and are silent on gluttony.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
Bert,
No doubt some folks use alcohol as a whipping boy. But, I don’t believe Aaron is doing that, here. If you abuse alcohol, you will die younger and harm others, too. It’s not partisan to say that, is it?
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
Discussion