In Case You Haven't Heard…

One in five adults experiences harm because of someone else's drinking, according to new research in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs . This is 53 million people. The study found “considerable risk for women from heavy, often male, drinkers in the household and, for men, from drinkers outside their family,” the authors write. The person's own drinking was a factor as well. Half of the people who were heavy drinkers said they had been harmed by someone else's drinking, and even those who drank but not heavily were at two to three times the risk of harassment, threats and driving‐related harm compared with abstainers. The study was conducted by Madhabika B. Nayak, Ph.D., of the Alcohol Research Group, a program of the Public Health Institute in Oakland, California, and based on telephone surveys. “[T]he freedom to drink alcohol must be counter‐balanced by the freedom from being afflicted by others' drinking in ways manifested by homicide, alcohol‐related sexual assault, car crashes, domestic abuse, lost household wages, and child neglect,” writes Timothy Naimi, M.D., M.P.H., of the Boston Medical Center in an accompanying commentary. Naimi advocates for increased taxes on alcoholic beverages. In a second commentary, Sven Andréasson, M.D., of the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm, Sweden, writes that setting minimum prices for alcohol is important for reducing the harms caused by drinking.