The New York Times reports today on a new study that shows an increase in alcohol-related deaths between 1999 and 2020. But it's based on numbers from the CDC's WONDER database, which is public and has a category just for alcohol. Here it is:
Sure enough, it's way up. Check the right boxes and you can get the numbers by age, race, region, and rural vs. metro if you feel like it. It only takes a few minutes, so I'm not sure why it took a journal article with eight co-authors to tell us this. But the article is paywalled, so maybe there's more in it that I can't see.
Seems to be covid related, and is tapering off.
Looks like the big surge was produced (unsurprisingly) by the Pandemic.
I'll bet. Lots of people feeling depressed and scared, drinking alone at home, without friends who can intervene or a bartender who can cut them off when they've had too much.
But look at the chart carefully and you can see it was on the rise even before the pandemic hit. I can't think of an easy explanation. Maybe it's from people mixing alcohol and opioids?
It looks like things were pretty steady until ~2011 when it starts trending up. Clearly covid caused the huge spike, but I wonder why it was trending up to begin with.
The Great Recession.
I would tell you how I jump the paywall but if I did the NYT would have me killed.
Maybe this explains the sudden prevalence of "Sober January"? Or is it "Dry January"? Lately, "sober" seems to have changed its meaning from "not drunk" to "practicing teetotaler" (aka "never drunk")