Americans consume more alcohol due to economic stress: Analyst

American writer and analyst Daniel Patrick Welch has blamed the state of the economy for an increase in alcohol-related deaths in the United States.

According to new US government data, more than 30,000 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes last year, a rate not seen in at least 35 years.

In 2014, there were 30,722 deaths from alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis, or 9.6 deaths per 100,000 people, an increase of 37 percent since 2002, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This figure of alcohol-induced deaths excludes fatalities from drunk driving, other accidents, and homicides committed under the influence of alcohol, the CDC said.

If those numbers were included, the annual death toll directly or indirectly caused by alcohol would be nearly 90,000.

Commenting to Press TV on Thursday, Welch said, "It's no secret that Americans are drinking more. Everyone knows this. The questions is why. And of course, it’s complicated and there a lot of factors, but one of the data points the government doesn’t want to focus on is the state of economy and how that relates to people’s economic insecurity, their stress level, and their desire to use alcohol as a means of escape or self-medication, etc.”

“And, one of the reasons they don’t want this is that they are engaged in a huge lying campaign about the state of economy in general. They are always tweaking these statistics and are trying to make it look like things are fine. And what it always leaves out is that things are only fine for the top 20 percent," he added. 

“It’s true that all governments lie, and all governments use statistics to manipulate things to bolster their performance, but the US is particularly ingenious and devious and creative about how they go about it,” he stated.  

"We use this thing called the Consumer Price Index -- the Chained CPI. The Chained CPI is based on the fact that if people can't afford beef, then they'll just choose chicken or tuna fish or peanut butter or whatever. Choosing down so that they don't have to say that the price of beef has gone up -- they don't have to admit that decline in the standard of living," the analyst explained. 

“What is interesting is that this also applies to alcohol. At the height of recession, there were these statistics that came out which were that we were spending less on alcohol overall but consuming more, which means the people doing the same thing, finding cheaper booze, finding cheaper places to drink. And millions of us know this anecdotally, without seeing any studies,”  Welch noted.

He went on to say that the US government only “cares about keeping the top 20 percent happy -- they always have and they always will -- because those are the people who wield power. The people in the lower four quintiles? Well they're just poor, and, you know -- what can you do.”

Philip Cook, a professor at Duke University who studies alcohol consumption patterns and their effects, says that per-capita alcohol consumption in the US has been rising since the late 1990s.

In recent years, US health experts have focused extensively on overdose deaths from opioid drugs like heroin and prescription painkillers, which have risen quickly since the early 2000s.

Welch said, “The thing is that only about one in three Americans is what they call a regular drinker. But still the number of people drinking – the percentage of people who consider themselves consumers of alcohol – is not increasing, the amount they are drinking is increasing.”

“There are socio-economic factors, there are societal factors, they are all sorts of things that go into that obviously, but the one thing that people don’t want to mention is the economic stress. There is an absolute knowledge among the people living under that stress. Everybody knows what's going on, and no one trusts the government's statistics. But they don't talk about it,” he concluded. 

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