Soberful Podcast by Veronica Valli, Episode 89 - The True Cost of Drinking, link

  • “Before I’d actually even spent money on alcohol, there was a take-out food. I inevitably lost a coat or a purse about every three months, no idea where they went. And that’s time consuming. […] The average listener to this, you know they might start thinking about drinking around about four o’clock at work if not earlier. They’re thinking ahead to what’s going to happen when they leave work. And so there’s a couple of hours there. Then you’ve got the time that you spend actually drinking when you get home. So that’s probably about another four hours. And then depending on whether or not you’re drinking has an impact on you the following morning. That might be another couple more hours before you’re back functioning again. So right there you’ve got four, six, eight hours of your life spent thinking about drinking and the impact of drinking on you.”
  • “So for me, I had horrific hangovers, like horrific. Which meant the next day I would be in bed all day. So if it was a Friday night, all Saturday would be in bed. The only thing that would get me going was hair of the dog. Because I’d have to go out on Saturday night. Sometimes I didn’t, because I’d got into such a bad state Sundays, or in bed all day Mondays, fifty-fifty. Could be in bed for a lot of the day, or if I managed to get to work or college, Monday and Tuesday were very unproductive. Drinking took up time. Preparing to drink took up time. But recovering from it took up a lot of hours of my life.”
  • “An early study in the United States of America by Stevenson found that three per cent of the male workforce in a steel mill missed time through drinking. The average work time lost by the workers was 22 days per year.”
  • “A United Kingdom study of males attending an alcoholic treatment unit found that half of the sample had lost time off work intheir early thirties.”
  • “In a study of several alcoholism informationcentres, 98 per cent of the workforce admitted they had lost time from workdue to their drinking, the amount of time off being staggering i.e. 86 days per year on average.”
  • “A Swedish study examined 868 patients attending 17 alcohol clinics in western Sweden and recorded the months they had worked outside hospital institutions during a particular year. The patient population were divided into three age groups 20 to 49, 50 to 59 and 60 onwards. 20 to 49 age group worked on average for only 50per cent of the year, whilst the older age group worked for only 25 per cent of the year. A low productivity performance was reported by 40 per cent of patients of the 20 to 49 age group and by 70 per cent in the top age group.”
  • “To quantify the extent of time spent by family and friends caring for drinkers and their dependents”
  • “Data are from a nationwide Alcohol’s Harm to Others Survey of 2649 Australians, in which 778 respondents reported they were harmed by a known drinker.”
  • “After carers were identified, the respondents were asked to estimate the amount of time spent on this in the past 12 months; the majority of carers (N = 358, 73%) did so.”
  • “Respondents who reported they were harmed by a drinker they knew had spent on average 32 h caring for this drinker and their dependents in the past 12 months.”
  • Table 2 categories include these time costs: caring for drinker, caring for children and other dependents, taxiing the drinker somewhere, and cleaning up after the drinking.

Konnopka & König 2007, Direct and Indirect Costs Attributable to Alcohol Consumption in Germany, link

  • “This study estimated the direct and indirect costs of alcohol-attributable morbidity and mortality in Germany for 2002 at […] approximately 23.5 million days of temporary inability to work”
  • [And note that Germany had a population of 82 million people at the time, and around 44% of the global population drinks, indicating that those 23.5 million days lost covered ~36 million Germans in 2002.]