These studies are often mentioned in media reports and in political discussions of how much damage 'drugs' do. The calculated costs are often used to show that more spending on 'drug prevention', police, and prisons makes economic sense. The following is intended to give an overview of where these numbers come from and what the sorting process is behind the final values. Health care costs. These include the costs of treating alcohol and drug abuse as well as illnesses or injuries brought on by alcohol or drug abuse.
All costs are for the U.S. in billions of dollars.
These include foregone earnings during 1992 among alcohol and drug abusers who suffer from illness or are in prison or jail and among persons who are victims of crime or accidents related to alcohol or drug abuse. Productivity losses also include the foregone lifetime earnings of individuals who died prematurely in 1992. These include nonhealth costs associated with drug and alcohol abuse, such as the costs of crime and criminal justice, social welfare, motor vehicle crashes, or fires. The fundamental approach in these prevalence-based studies was to determine all 'forgone alternatives' or 'opportunity costs' to the economy which resulted from illness or death in the current year caused by past and present substance abuse. Opportunity cost is the dollar value of resources that are redirected away from uses to which they would have otherwise been put.