Funding for Substance Abuse Skimps on Prevention
A new study found that of the $467.70 billion that state, local, and federal governments spend on substance abuse each year, 96% is used to deal with the consequences of substance abuse such as crime and homelessness, and only about 2% is used for prevention.
The report from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University also states that of that money, governments spend the most on health care costs associated with substance abuse (58%), followed by the costs of prosecuting and jailing offenders (13.1%).
“These governments have it backwards,” says Joseph Califano Jr., founder and chairman of CASA. “They’re wasting billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and not making some relatively simple investments that could sharply reduce the consequences of drug and alcohol addiction.”
He continues, “The killer finding is that we are spending 96 cents of every dollar we spend on substance abuse and addiction to shovel up the human wreckage. We’re making this really tiny investment in prevention and treatment when we have enough experience to know that prevention and treatment can reduce the shoveling-up burden.”
Califano says that federal and state governments aren’t ready to change their priorities because of the stigma attached to substance abuse. The government needs to “mount major prevention programs” with a focus on kids, he says. He adds that increasing taxes on alcohol and training doctors to talk to their patients about their substance use will also help decrease associated costs.
“This is a problem we can deal with. We know a lot more about it than we knew years ago,” he says.
