Hey there! For what it’s worth, did you look at the Global Burden of Disease study? They define ‘cause’ and ‘risk factor’ separately. So they have direct drug overdoses in causes, but also calculate death & DALY burdens that are attributable to drug addiction, tobacco use, and high alcohol use (you can play around with the models here). Note that all estimates below have wide credible intervals in their models, but I’ve omitted them for readability. I also don’t know how they perform their risk factor attribution, but since a lot of experts contribute to this I can’t imagine it’s worse than your analysis or missing something crucial.
In their data, tobacco contributes 195M DALYs/year (6.76% of the total DALY burden suffered by all humanity), high alcohol use contributes 72M or 2.51%, and drug use 28M or 0.96%.
In the U.S., these risk factors contribute 22M DALYs/year. Combined, this is more than all direct level-2 causes of death in the GBD (cardiovascular, in #1, has 18M DALYs/year). Equivalently, it would be the 5th-largest level-2 direct cause globally, behind cardiovascular, respiratory, neoplasms, and maternal disorders. But I’d warn against making these sorts of comparisons because they obviously depend on how you slice up your data (for the same reason, the chart you made from WHO data doesn’t hold much water with me on its face).
I think the best next steps for you would be to create a strong case that addiction is neglected relative to top EA cause areas such as malaria, childhood vaccinations, maternal health, and so on. You could try to find good estimates on the amount of global or per-country funding going to each issue relative to their contribution to the global burden of disease. I am not sure how that analysis would play out, but I’d love to see it on the forum!
Hey there! For what it’s worth, did you look at the Global Burden of Disease study? They define ‘cause’ and ‘risk factor’ separately. So they have direct drug overdoses in causes, but also calculate death & DALY burdens that are attributable to drug addiction, tobacco use, and high alcohol use (you can play around with the models here). Note that all estimates below have wide credible intervals in their models, but I’ve omitted them for readability. I also don’t know how they perform their risk factor attribution, but since a lot of experts contribute to this I can’t imagine it’s worse than your analysis or missing something crucial.
In their data, tobacco contributes 195M DALYs/year (6.76% of the total DALY burden suffered by all humanity), high alcohol use contributes 72M or 2.51%, and drug use 28M or 0.96%.
In the U.S., these risk factors contribute 22M DALYs/year. Combined, this is more than all direct level-2 causes of death in the GBD (cardiovascular, in #1, has 18M DALYs/year). Equivalently, it would be the 5th-largest level-2 direct cause globally, behind cardiovascular, respiratory, neoplasms, and maternal disorders. But I’d warn against making these sorts of comparisons because they obviously depend on how you slice up your data (for the same reason, the chart you made from WHO data doesn’t hold much water with me on its face).
I think the best next steps for you would be to create a strong case that addiction is neglected relative to top EA cause areas such as malaria, childhood vaccinations, maternal health, and so on. You could try to find good estimates on the amount of global or per-country funding going to each issue relative to their contribution to the global burden of disease. I am not sure how that analysis would play out, but I’d love to see it on the forum!
Thank you, this is extremely helpful! I will dive into this.