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Societal Cost Of Underage Drinking

Despite the existence of a minimum drinking age of 21 years in most states, young people continue to have ready access to alcohol. This study attempted to measure the harm this may cause. The researchers estimated the magnitude and costs of problems from underage drinking by category – traffic crashes, violence, property crime, suicide, burns, drowning, fetal alcohol syndrome, high-risk sex, poisonings, psychoses, and dependency treatment – and comparing those costs with associated alcohol sales. For each category of alcohol-related problems, researchers estimated fatal and nonfatal cases that were attributable to underage alcohol use. They then multiplied alcohol-attributable cases by estimated costs per case to obtain total costs for each problem.

Results indicate that underage drinking merits just as much attention as use of illicit drugs and tobacco by youth. Specifically, underage drinking accounted for at least 16 percent of alcohol sales in 2001, led to 3,170 deaths, and caused an estimated bill of $61.9 billion, including $5.4 billion in medical costs, $14.9 billion in work loss plus other quality-of-life costs. Even leaving aside these quality-of-life costs, which are very difficult to measure, societal harm of $1 per drink consumed by an underage drinker exceeded the 90 cents in average purchase price of an average drink.

(Miller, TR, Levy, DT, Spicer, RS, Taylor, DM: Societal costs of underage drinking. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 67:519-528, 2006.)

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