• The Centre for Alcohol Policy Research
• Alcohol’s Harm to Others
• Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
• Community Polling
  • Annual Alcohol Poll 2011
  • Annual Alcohol Poll 2012
    • Awareness of standard drinks and the Guidelines
    • Alcohol consumption during pregnancy and breastfeeding
    • Licensing and alcohol-related violence
    • Alcohol Advertising
• Research Library

Alcohol’s Harm to Others

The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others report, commissioned by the Foundation and undertaken by the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, demonstrates how an individual’s drinking impacts on the people around them. For the first time internationally, this research examined how a person’s drinking affects their family, co-workers, friends, and strangers, to demonstrate how one person’s alcohol misuse can impact on entire communities.

Results from this research were also included in the World Health Organisation’s Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, 2011, and WHO is using the study as a model for such studies globally.

The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others provides a missing piece of the puzzle in policy discussions by providing a more complete picture of the harms that result from alcohol misuse. Examining the full extent of alcohol-related harms in our community provides us with a greater understanding of how complex alcohol misuse is in Australia and the need for a range of policy responses that address the varied harms and their determinants.

Harms from someone else’s drinking

The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others found that:

• 367 people died and almost 14,000 people were hospitalized because of the drinking of others
• More than 70,000 Australians were victims of alcohol-related assault, of these 24,000 people were victims of alcohol related domestic violence
• Almost 20,000 children were victims of substantiated alcohol-related child abuse
• More than 10 million Australians experienced some negative effect of a stranger’s drinking in one year
• 70% of Australians were affected in some way by another person’s drinking

The cost of alcohol’s harm to others

The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others also examined the economic impact of alcohol on the Australian community and found that:

• The cost of someone else’s drinking totals more than $20.6 billion
• Tangible costs which consists of out-of-pocket costs, forgone wages or productivity, and hospital and child protection costs to $14.3 billion
• Intangible costs equate to $6.4 billion. These are costs assigned to lost quality of life due to someone else’s drinking

Further information

Further information on the impacts of alcohol’s harm to others can be found in the following publications;

• The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others report
• Technical report
• Response to Access Economics Critique of the report

View media releases from the report launch.

Watch videos of the launch day on our Vimeo channel.