The numbers are overwhelming, but they pale beside the waste, pale beside the human tragedies, beside the heart-sickening, leather-skinned, flinty-eyed, toothless remnants of human beings we knew as healthy, open, innocent, clear-eyed children just a few years ago.
I see them every day. We all do. We all know them. We know them everywhere, when we look-bizarre, exoskeletal, incomprehensible human husks from a Kafka novel, but mostly we don’t look. We look away. And there is silence.
Expensive silence.
Expensive, as in like half a trillion annually. That’s the cost of addiction in this country-five hundred billion dollars. Numerically it looks like this: $500,000,000,000, most of it spent on wreckage clean-up.
Of course, that doesn’t count what families suffer. It doesn’t count the heartbreak tab. It doesn’t count lost productivity. It doesn’t count what economists call “opportunity” costs. In other words, it doesn’t count the dead, doesn’t count contributions you can’t make because you killed yourself with a needle while you were still in your twenties.
Yeah, government picks up most of the wreckage costs. Translation: taxpayers pick it up. We seem willing to do it.
The 2009 report of the National Center on Addiction and Substance abuse at Columbia University says our governments-local, state, and federal-spent nearly 11 percent of their combined budgets busy with brooms and dustpans.
How does that break down? What’s your part? Fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars for every man, woman and child in America.
If you add it all up, here in Patrick County addiction costs twenty-nine million dollars. For all of Virginia, add a few zeroes. Make it twelve billion.
The same Columbia University report says 95.6 cents of every state and federal dollar spent in 2005 went to aftermath cleanup, 1.9 cents was spent on prevention and treatment and 0.4 cents on research.
There is something wrong with this picture.
Why we’re so willing to clean up a mess, but so unwilling to prevent it is a puzzle to me.
I think it’s a matter of language. We call addiction the wrong thing. .
Our legislators in Richmond will slap their grandmothers if that’s what it takes to shave taxes half-a-cent somewhere.
They’ll relegate solvency of the Virginia Retirement System to the Tooth Fairy.
They’ll sell their souls-and the liquor stores-in pursuit of mathematical illusion, pursuit of something-for-nothing alchemy.
They’ll debate the paint off the walls in the matter of borrowing four billion dollars for transportation.
But there will be silence, not a peep, squeak, nor sputter, when it comes to the twelve billion dollars that addiction costs Virginia taxpayers.
Why is that? It’s language. We’re using the wrong language.
If we called drug addiction what it is-an insidious tax-we would bring it to heel.
Our delegates and senators would wax eloquent, huffing, puffing, and venting their spleens.
You kiddin’ me? Twelve billion dollars? They’ll fleck spittle!
Wannabes would run on it.
The Tea-Partiers would dance a jig.
There’d be hearings.
Commissions would report.
The glassy-eyed would line op to sign pledges.
The local Watch-Doggers would harrumph indignations.
Who knows. It could get infectious, catch a surge.
Why, give him another year and the President himself will be bringing it up in his next State of the Union lippery.
Powerful stuff, language.
A personal note: A member of my family is an oxycontin addict. Hospitalized twice by overdoses within the last year, he is currently in a five-month rehab program in California.
And for the record: I consume tobacco and alcohol, mostly Camels and Old Crow.
For additional reading on the costs of addiction–alcohol, tobacco, drugs, legal and otherwise–to local, state and federal governments, and their taxpayers, download the report from Columbia’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. BKD
What “addictions” are we talking about? We have both legal and illegal addictions and they both have real costs, right?
Unfortunately, Barnie, you’ve neglected to mention the most expensive and unnecessary (indeed, unconstitutional) addition of all: the addition to government handouts.
Of course, mentioning that one is a discomfiting, since solving it is the easiest of all: cut them off.
Barnie:
First and foremost - my hopes and prayers go out to your family member battling the addiction to oxycontin. It’s good to hear that he or she is in a rehab program.
As usual, a very well written article.
Thinking of drug abuse as both a societal problem and a tax on non abusers is right on the money.
But how to get a handle on this example of runaway government spending?
Make drug testing a pre-requisite to receiving government benefits? It’s a pre-requisite to initial employment at many companies. It’s a pre-requisite to continued employment at some companies (and the US military). Why not make it a pre-requisite to receiving government benefits?
Spend more now on education and treatment in the hope of spending less on cleaning up the aftermath later?
Legalize pot, tax it to high heaven and use the proceeds to pay for education and treatment of other drug abuse?
Make cigarettes and liquor illegal since they are are widely viewed as being at least as addictive and harmful as other drugs currently prohibited in the United States?
Using better language is a good start. But better language needs to be followed by new ideas. The US seems to have lost the “war on drugs” (Nixon coined the term in 1971). Maybe time for new language and new tactics?
Groveton, thanks for your note. I don’t know the answer, but I think it is a combination of your suggestions, and others. I know what we’re doing is not working. We’re packing our jails and prisons with $40,000-cost-per-year inmates–70-80 percent of whom are incarcerated on drug-related charges. We’re spending billions on the wrong end of the supply-demand equation. The so-called “war on drugs” is a futile, “supply” oriented debacle. The emphasis, I believe, should be on “demand.” Supply will disappear only when demand does. We teach our children to fear snakes and spiders and such (although I acknowledge that a lot of research indicates some of this fear is already genetically present), when cigarettes, booze, pills and needles represent a far greater danger to them. We should legalize marijuana, and tax the hell out of it. We should also, in my opinion, tax the hell out of manufacturers and dispensers of pharmaceutical addictives. Think of it as a collateral damage surcharge. Doctors prescribe addictive painkillers like they’re so many pretty-colored candies, the government and private insurance companies pay for them, and much of the sheer volume flows into a street economy that drives destruction and crime on a massive scale–and, of course, the taxpayers are summoned to bring their brooms and shovels. My brother-in-law works for a major utility. His insurance is picking up most of the $29,000 tab for the kid in rehab in California. Guess who the end-payer is. You and me, and everybody who hits a light switch. Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. What we’re doing now is insanity. BKD
re: ” His insurance is picking up most of the $29,000 tab for the kid in rehab in California.”
…
” packing our jails and prisons with $40,000-cost-per-year inmates–70-80 percent of whom are incarcerated on drug-related charges.”
The biggest state agency in Virginia in terms of employees?
DOC = Department of Corrections.
If you add to that all the costs associated with drug-related health care costs - it’s a tidy piece of change but one thing we don’t have is how much it costs you and me directly….
how much is each of our share of the State’s prison costs?
Is it $5 a year, $50 a year, $500 a year.
what percentage is it our the taxes we pay?
5, 10, 15% ?
My view is that until we all know cost data - that it ends up often being one of those “this needs to be fixed but we also have so many other issues to fix so just how important is it - comparatively?”
One “idea” I heard in the conversation is adding the costs of rehabilitation for the specific drugs and addictive substances in the costs.
So when you buy cigarettes for instance, the costs required to treat illnesses and diseases that are a result - are built into the cost.
One of the biggest “addictions” that has been with us longer than cigarettes is …..alcohol…
and …prescription drugs….
but as far as I can tell - no one in rehabilitation for marijuana “addiction” though perhaps I am ignorant on this and the rehabilitation centers are overflowing…
I can the same could be said about cocaine, eh?
It sorta points up the ironic dimensions of usage verses “addiction”.
some folks can drink alcohol their entire life - every day even - and never one drive drunk or miss work or end up in jail for drunken “rage”, etc.
Then ..others… any/all of the above.
Same with oxycondin. It can be literally a life-saver for many people with temporary or chronic pain - and then others… get trapped - not that different from smokers who cannot quit.
As a “smoker” who has not smoked for years, but has quit 3 different times - I can attest to just how difficult it is to quit - and I can also attest to the clear damage the habit was doing to my health.
All the best to you and your family as you work your way through the issues.