April is Alcohol Awareness Month
To The Editor:
Each April since 1987, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc. (NCADD) has sponsored Alcohol Awareness Month to increase public awareness and encourage local communities to focus on alcoholism and alcohol-related issues. They use this opportunity to address the nation’s Number One public health problem through awareness programs.
I would like to encourage ministers to take advantage of Alcohol Awareness Month designation to preach a sermon on this monumental problem that is killing us physically and financially. There is no shortage of information on the internet about alcohol, and all of it, as far as the effects of alcohol, is very bad.
According to NCADD, in the United States 17.6 million people, or one in every 12 adults, suffers from alcohol abuse or dependence with 88,000 deaths attributed annually to excessive alcohol use. Alcohol results in an economic drain on the nation’s resources of approximately $223.5 billion annually.
We are led to believe that alcoholism is a disease only because in 1956 the American Medical Association decided it was a disease. Alcohol certainly causes many diseases. However, if it is a disease, why is this disease encouraged and promoted by advertising alcohol on radio, newspapers, magazines, movies, TV shows, etc.? If alcoholism is a disease, it it not insane the way the cause of this disease is treated as something great and wonderful? Am I missing something here?
A study reported in 2010 out of London states “Alcohol is more dangerous that illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine.” British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a
whole. Alcohol is a drug and it is the number one gateway drug to these harder drugs.
Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances as being the most destructive to individuals and society.
Researchers calculated that in 2007, alcohol cost each person in the U.S. $733. How utterly foolish are we to tolerate something that causes such devastation to our families and society and takes so much money from our pockets just so a few can make a lot of money, money that would go into something productive.