It Costs More to Kill Us Than to Help Us Get Back on Our Feet: <i>Investing in Recovery is Cheaper and Yields Dividends</i>

Alcohol, Tobacco and other drug mortality leads loss in America if you add it all up, which we do not. But of course, it does not end there. We also fail to consider non mortality associated carnage. It costs us billions in lost productivity, associated healthcare costs, criminal justice expenditures and innumerable other burdens. To highlight one of the myriad of such outlays, the BoatUS Foundation calculates that impaired boating costs us 240 million dollars a year. Last week in ADAW, the lead article cited Indivior, finding that the average case of OUD costs $695,000 a year, most in the criminal justice system. It breaks down costs per state, and it calculates in my home state of PA, Opioid Use Disorders alone cost us over 232 Billion dollars. You cannot look anywhere in our budgets without uncovering similar stats, but we do not add all these vast burdens on society up. It is either a number so large that we cannot fathom it, or that we do not care enough to add it all up because if we did, we would have to actually do more about it. The Occom's Razor of our dearth of data in respect to all the societal costs from alcohol and other substance use. We don't want to know the full scope of costs because then we would have to do more about it.