Word: alcoholism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...complained that brewers and beer distributors spend $15 million to $20 million a year marketing their products on college campuses, encouraging heavy drinking and "contributing to poor grades, excessive vandalism, many injuries, and not so infrequently, death." Bowen asked Education Secretary William Bennett to encourage university presidents to restrict alcohol promotions on campus. Spuds MacKenzie, the canine star of Anheuser-Busch's advertising campaign for Bud Light beer, is also in the doghouse. This fall the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors filed complaints with several federal agencies charging that the campaign encouraged kids to drink...
...stakes are high. Alcoholism claims tens of thousands of lives each year, ruins untold numbers of families and costs $117 billion a year in everything from medical bills to lost workdays. The magnitude of the problem has been overshadowed in recent years by the national preoccupation with the new threat of AIDS and the widespread use of drugs such as heroin, cocaine, marijuana and crack. "Take the deaths from every other abused drug," says Loran Archer, deputy director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Washington. "Add them together, and they still don't equal...
...Alcoholism's toll is frightening. Cirrhosis of the liver kills at least 14,000 alcoholics a year. Drunk drivers were responsible for approximately half the 46,000 driving fatalities in the U.S. in 1986. Alcohol was implicated in up to 70% of the 4,000 drowning deaths last year and in about 30% of the nearly 30,000 suicides. A Department of Justice survey estimates that nearly a third of the nation's 523,000 state-prison inmates drank heavily before committing rapes, burglaries and assaults. As many as 45% of the country's more than 250,000 homeless...
...from $4,000 to $20,000 for in-patient care; today medical insurance covers the tab for 70% of American workers in companies with more than 100 employees. In the early 1970s, the Kemper Group of Long Grove, Ill., was the first national insurance company to include coverage for alcoholism in all its group policies. The firm's hunch: the bill for helping an alcoholic quit today would be cheaper than nursing him through afflictions like cirrhosis of the liver and strokes later in life. The logic of acting sooner rather than later has since spread throughout corporate America. Some...
Simultaneously, another shadowy fact of life about alcoholics has been dragged into the light: the severe emotional scars they leave on their spouses and especially on their children. "Years ago the focus fell solely on the alcoholic," says Carol, a mother of four and wife of an alcoholic. "Nobody identified the needs of the family." Indeed, alcohol abuse accounts for more family troubles than any other single factor. A Gallup poll this year found that one in four families reported a problem with liquor at home, the highest reported rate since 1950 and twice the 1974 rate. According to Health...