Drinking, smoking, and the use of psychotropic drugs have a variety of consequences for those who partake of them, for their families and associates, and for society at large. A number of these consequences are negative. Smokers die young from heart or lung disease, drinkers get into traffic accidents and fights, drug injectors spread the HIV virus. In the context of public policymaking, where priorities must be set for the use of scarce resources, it seems important to have a measure of the overall magnitude of the social burden engendered by such consequences. One familiar approach is to express the magnitude of the problem in terms of the number of people who die each year. When we learn that there are 107,400 deaths per year in the United States from ALCOHOL abuse (Harwood et al., 1998) and perhaps...