Thomas Mott Osborne: “Underage drinking currently costs the United States $53 billion annually, according to one study. According to the…”

“Underage drinking currently costs the United States $53 billion annually, according to one study. According to the American Medical Association that figure should be $61 billion. And in the State of Nebraska, which I represent, that translates to over $2,000 per youth in the State of Nebraska, is what the cost to the United States is. But the cost is really counted in more than financial aspects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the number of underage deaths due to excessive alcohol is roughly $4,500 a year, which is six times the death rate that we are experiencing annually in Iraq. An estimated 3 million teenagers are full-blown alcoholics and several million more have severe drinking problems. Alcohol kills six times more young people than all other illegal drugs combined. Let me say that again: it kills six times what cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana does combined. And yet the Federal Government considerably underfunds the efforts to combat underage drinking. We currently spend $1.8 billion on hard drugs and only $71 million on underage drinking. That is a ratio of 25 to 1. That needs to be corrected. Recent studies have found that heavy exposure to the adolescent brain to alcohol may interfere with brain development.”