Underage drinking is worth $23 billion!

Underage drinking is worth nearly $23 billion a year to the alcohol industry, or 17.5 percent of all money spent on spirits in the US annually, researchers from New York's Columbia University report.

And abusive drinking by both underage people and adults may account for nearly half of all money spent on alcohol each year.

"What we see here is that there is a large conflict of interest for the alcohol industry between profitability and public health," Susan E. Foster of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia.

Underage drinking and alcoholism are tightly linked, Foster noted. People who start drinking before age 21 are twice as likely to become addicted to alcohol, while the risk of becoming an alcoholic is four times greater among those who begin drinking before their 15th birthday.

The researchers estimated the value of underage drinking as $22.5 billion, while adult abusive drinkers accounted for $25.8 billion. Together, the value of underage and abusive drinking was $48.3 billion, or 37.5 percent of the total. Using a different dataset, the value was estimated at $62.9 billion, or 48.8 percent of all money spent annually on alcohol.

Stating the obvious? Obviously a serious problem. Article here.