Drunkenness Carries a Very High Price-tag

This is no spiritual analogy.  It's raw data.

The Cap Times:

Wisconsin is picking up the tab for excessive drinking to the tune of $6.8 billion a year, according to Health First Wisconsin.

The group, formerly Smoke-Free Wisconsin, says that problem drinking costs the state $749 million in health care costs, $649 million in criminal justice costs and a whopping $4.9 billion in lost productivity. Of the lost productivity costs, $1.2 billion results from 1,500 premature deaths a year.

The report, which you can read here, was done by researchers at the UW Population Health Institute.

“We’ve always known that Wisconsin has a serious problem with alcohol, but until today most of us could only guess about the scale of the problem and the cost we all pay,” said Maureen Busalacchi, executive director of Health First Wisconsin. "The results of the report are staggering."

According to the report, taxpayers are on the hook for 40 percent of the costs, which comes to about $2.9 billion a year.

Read the rest.