2023-08-02 03:00:08
The calculations are complex but they show, in a few tables, an estimate of what drugs cost society each year. “lawful” (alcohol, tobacco) and “illegal”, according to the terminology used by Pierre Kopp, professor at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne and lawyer at the Paris Bar, author of a note on the subject commissioned by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT ), made public on Monday, July 31. A statistical gateway, to understand, other than through the prism of miscellaneous facts, seizures and arrests, the consequences of the consumption, sale and trafficking of these substances in the broad sense.
Cost of lives lost, cost of lost production (for companies), cost of loss of quality of life (for the individual consumer), but also cost of care, prevention, repression for public finances, compared to savings made on unpaid pensions (to deceased persons) and on taxes levied (alcohol and tobacco)… The equation as posed the author, extending a previous study published in 2015, enabled him to obtain three key figures: per year, the “social cost” of tobacco amounts to 156 billion euros, that of alcohol, to 102 billion euros, when that of illicit drugs reached 7.7 billion euros.
The publication may be very recent, but the reference year of the data is 2019. A time necessary to collect, process and analyze statistics from very varied origins, he argues. This was already the case with the 2015 note, which covered the year 2010. And, before it, once more, on a previous exercise covering the year 2000 and released in 2006.
« The gap between the social costs of the three categories of drugs is essentially explained by the difference in the extent of consumption and associated mortality., replies Pierre Kopp, who a few years ago was the lawyer for the National Committee once morest Smoking; 73,189 tobacco-related deaths were recorded over the reference year, 41,080 were attributed to alcohol and 1,230 to the consumption of illicit drugs.
To understand the gap, we can also refer to the number of so-called “at-risk” consumers, who are responsible for most of the social costs, even if this quantification is tricky: they are estimated at thirteen million for the tobacco (daily smokers), 3.5 million for alcohol (8% of 18-75 year olds) and 300,000 for illicit drugs.
You have 61.43% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
1690963039
#social #cost #alcohol #tobacco #legal #illegal #drugs
