Alcohol Abuse Costs DoD Dearly
By Staff Sgt. Kathleen T. Rhem, USA
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 6, 2000 -- Twenty-one percent of service members admit to
drinking heavily -- a statistic the military hasn’t managed to lower in
20 years -- but service officials are determined to change that.
“If you look at heavy use of alcohol, drinking a lot in a short span of
time, we tend to have a higher prevalence than the civilian community,”
said Lt. Col. Wayne Talcott, an Air Force psychologist. Young military people
between 18 and 25 also tend to do more heavy drinking than their civilian peers,
he noted.
Speaking only in terms of medical care and lost time at work, alcohol abuse
costs DoD more than $600 million each year, said Navy Capt. Robert Murphy, a
medical corps officer. DoD spends another $132 million a year to care for babies
with fetal alcohol syndrome -- sometimes-serious health problems related to
their mothers’ heavy drinking.
Talcott and Murphy co-chair the relatively new DoD Alcohol Abuse and Tobacco
Use Reduction Committee. Their goal is to reduce the prevalence of heavy drinking
within the military by 5 percent a year by changing DoD officials’ focus
on alcohol abuse from treatment to prevention.
“We have very good treatment programs, but they’re very expensive
and don’t reach a lot of people,” Murphy said. “We’re focusing
on prevention. We’re certainly not opposed to alcohol use, but we are trying
to reduce the prevalence of alcohol abuse.”
“We’re trying to prevent people from having to see a specialist,”
Talcott said. “If you want to decrease prevalence, you need to have policies
and programs in place across the spectrum to discourage heavy drinking.”
As some colleges do with their students, Talcott said, the committee wants to
help service members understand the liabilities associated with heavy drinking.
“We want to help them understand if you drink this much and you drive you’re
going to be under the influence, or at this level you’re impaired,”
he said.
The committee also aims to better track alcohol-related adverse events, such
as incidences of driving under the influence, suicides, crimes and domestic
violence, Murphy said. He explained there’s no centralized DoD tracking
system, though the services collect data that can be collated into DoD-wide
figures.
Recent civilian studies have turned up some frightening statistics, Murphy said.
Thirty-one percent of all occupational injuries are alcohol-related, as are
23 percent of suicides and 32 percent of homicides.
Talcott said senior officials have likened DoD's new approach to preventive
maintenance. “You maintain a jet engine so it doesn’t fall out of
the sky,” he said. “We need to begin to look at where there are risks
to the human weapon system and how we can build a system that protects our people.”
This is very different from previous approaches, he said. “You typically
have program offices that largely are designed to treat people with alcohol
problems,” Talcott explained. “Rather than waiting for people to develop
severe problems, we want to build into the system ways to get the right messages
to help our young people make better decisions about their drinking behavior.
“It’s not the use, it’s alcohol abuse that gets people into trouble,”
he said.
Information Courtesy of American Forces Information Service
