Over the past two decades, five major studies have used the COI framework to estimate the economic costs of alcohol abuse1 in the United States (Berry et al. 1977; Cruze et al. 1981; Harwood et al. 1984, 1998; Rice et al. 1990). These studies estimate the costs of alcohol abuse including health care costs, productivity losses, and additional costs, such as those associated with alcohol-related crime and motor vehicle crashes. In the most recent of these COI studies, researchers estimated the overall economic cost of alcohol abuse at $148 billion for 1992, the most recent year for which adequate data were available at the time of the study (Harwood et al. 1998). Making adjustments for population growth and inflation, the authors also projected their estimates forward to 1995, for which the overall estimated cost was $166.6 billion, and to 1998, for which the overall estimated cost was $184.6 billion, or roughly $683 for every man, woman, and child living in the United States in 1998 (Harwood 2000). Unless otherwise noted, cost figures reported in this section are drawn from the update for 1998.
