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Thursday, December 31, 2009
DWI Not N.M.'s Biggest Booze Killer
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Drunken-driving deaths fall, other alcohol-related deaths rise, and the financial toll is in the billions.
We spend a lot of time worrying about how mired New Mexico is in poverty. About how deadly we drive. About losing so many to illness and disease. About our kids being born small and undernourished. About our young men killing themselves and killing one another.
We chase our tails around and around, we layer on time and money and effort, and still we find ourselves lost in a jumble of bad statistics and poor outcomes.
As the joker famously suggested to the thief, there must be some kind of way out of here.
If you spend a little time with the man whose full-time job it is to study how all the alcohol we drink in New Mexico harms us, you start to see a common thread — and maybe a road map to a safer future.
Jim Roeber is an alcohol epidemiologist at the New Mexico Department of Health, a position funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For five years, he has been looking at death and injury numbers, incidences of disease, health care bills, court and incarceration costs and a long list of other factors that all trace back to alcohol use in New Mexico.
A snapshot of the year 2006 shows nearly a thousand deaths attributable to alcohol and a monetary cost shared by all of us of $2.5 billion, the greatest portion of that coming from lost productivity.
We hear so much about drunken driving that it might come as a surprise that only 15 percent of those deaths attributable to alcohol were in auto crashes.
About 10 percent were people who suffered a fatal fall while intoxicated. Another 10 percent were people who overdosed on drugs while intoxicated.
The largest group — 271 people in one year — was made up of people who succumbed to alcohol-related chronic liver disease.
All this illness and injury is traceable to drinking patterns that fall into two categories: "chronic heavy" and "binge," according to Roeber.
If you're a drinker, you might not like the definitions, but here they are:
Chronic heavy drinking is having more than two drinks a day on average for men and more than one drink a day for women. (That's the three-beer trip to the bar after work for you guys and the two glasses of wine you ladies have as you unwind and watch "Jeopardy." (About 4 percent of New Mexicans say that "chronic" pattern describes their drinking behavior.) Chronic heavy drinking is responsible for New Mexico ranking first or second in the nation every year in chronic alcohol-related diseases, Roeber says.
Binge drinking is having five or more drinks at a time for men and four or more for women. (Thirteen percent of New Mexicans say they fall into that category.) Binge drinking is responsible for us ranking regularly in the top three in the nation in alcohol-related injuries, according to Roeber.
While alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths in New Mexico have steadily declined, all other alcohol-related deaths have increased.
Roeber suggests those two statistics show the state's aggressive DWI campaign has done a great job of affecting driving behavior but has not changed drinking levels. It also shows that a concentrated attack on a problem can reduce deaths.
"The message is that when we focus our attention and resources, we can really make a difference," Roeber says.
That hasn't happened with liver disease, even though it kills many more people than DWI and racks up big monetary costs.
"There's a huge burden of pain and suffering associated with liver disease that's not out there in the public eye," he points out.
Roeber poses this question: "Do we have the technology and resources to do with binge drinking and heavy drinking what we've done with DWI?"
Certainly we do. The public policy literature is filled with studies that show approaches that work to curb alcohol consumption: Raise taxes on alcohol, limit the times and places it is for sale, reduce liquor license densities in problem communities, put the whole alcohol sale business under state government management.
The more provocative question is, do we have the will?
Everyone by now, I think, would agree it's dangerous and just wrong to drive while intoxicated. But do we agree that it's equally or more dangerous to live with a slow, three-drinks-a-day alcohol drip?
Maybe you do. Or maybe you like to pick up a couple of cold 40s at the gas station at the end of your shift. Or maybe you like to split a bottle of wine with your spouse with dinner every night. Maybe you find yourself getting wasted to celebrate, or when you're lonely, or just because it's Friday.
Maybe you like to think the heavy drinker is the other guy.
In next Thursday's column, I'll talk to the state behavioral health people for their thoughts on why we drink so much and what efforts the state is taking to encourage us to ease up on the bottle. If you've got any ideas on how we can find our way out of here — or whether we need to — call me or drop me an e-mail.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
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