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Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker
Office of the Attorney General
State of Georgia
40 Capitol Square SW
Atlanta, Georgia 30334
Dear Sir:
While I am grateful for Deputy Attorney
General Brenda H. Cole's reply to me of January 6, 1998, regarding
my previous correspondence to you about your legal action against
the tobacco industry; I am disappointed -- but not too surprised
-- to see that she avoided all mention in her recent letter to me
of the immense costs to Georgia's taxpayers which occur as the
result of widespread beverage alcohol use in our state in respect
to:
- tax-supported local and state law enforcement expenses to
deal with alcohol-related crimes including rape, murder,
aggravated assault, robbery, auto theft, arson and yet other
offenses,
tax-supported local and state court
costs required to hear alcohol-related criminal cases,
tax-supported local jail and state
prison construction and day-to- day operating expenses -- to
rise sharply if Georgia ends parole(1)
-- required to incarcerate offenders of alcohol-related crimes,
tax-supported foster care in our state
required for the abandoned, neglected or abused children in our
state whom are the hapless young victims of alcohol-related
family sociopathy,
tax-supported additional education
expenses -- including costly psychological treatment -- required
as well for abandoned, neglected or abused children from homes
with alcohol-related family sociopathy,
tax-supported special education costs
for mentally-retarded children in our state whom are born with
irreversible brain impairment due to the fetal alcohol syndrome
(FAS) in addition to and above the direct health-care costs for
treatment of physical defects (e.g., abnormal hearts and
disfiguring facial clefts) also found in FAS newborns, and
tax-supported custodial expenses --
full-time institutional care as well as that provided in group
homes -- for mentally-retarded adult men and women in Georgia
whom are victims of more severe irreversible brain impairment
due to the fetal alcohol syndrome as well: costs for shelter,
food and supervisory care stemming from alcohol use on their
respective mothers' part during pregnancy that may not be deemed
as direct health-care costs by some individuals but are
certainly costs borne by Georgia's taxpayers nonetheless.
In short, Deputy Attorney General
Brenda H. Cole's recent letter -- copy provided here -- merely
cited health-care costs; she made no mention at all concerning
the greater and far more widespread costs to operate our state's
expensive criminal court system, penal institutions, and other
tax-supported services -- additional public schooling costs
among them -- required to deal with alcohol-related crime and
alcohol-related family sociopathy as well as the tax-supported
life-long care required for those individuals in Georgia born
with alcohol-related mental retardation, too.
To illustrate how widespread the use of
beverage alcohol is associated with criminal behavior in our
society, I am providing an enlightening table below regarding
alcohol and criminal behavior in the United States that was
obtained from a paper found on the internet: a study in Europe
with about 50 or so cited references to other published data
sources.(2)
|
Alcohol use by
incarcerated offenders at the time of the crime
for which they were sent to prison (the most serious
offence)
United States -- 1976
|
Worst
present
offence
---------------- |
Proportion of offenders
drinking at the time of
the crime
------------------------ |
Size
of
sample
------- |
| Arson |
66.7% |
647 |
| Aggravated assault |
62.2% |
3,311 |
| Assault, simple and
undetermined |
58.8% |
1,781 |
| Sexual crimes |
57.0% |
6,919 |
| Kidnapping |
55.2% |
1,220 |
| Manslaughter |
55.1% |
4,260 |
| Murder |
52.8% |
10,811 |
| Attempted murder |
48.4% |
2,088 |
| Burglary |
46.8% |
16,241 |
| Auto theft |
46.0% |
1,564 |
| Robbery without weapon |
40.5% |
5,504 |
| Robbery with weapon |
38.9% |
11,113 |
| Forgery |
38.0% |
2,887 |
| Larceny |
37.5% |
4,491 |
| Other crimes |
29.9% |
8,254 |
While the data above is a bit old, it
most likely still reflects quite well the proportion of various
crimes associated with alcoholic beverage use in our society
today, at least for the most part. If you can provide me with
more recent detailed data from an unbiased source, please do so,
sir.
Further, based on research spanning
from the late 1960s to today, the primary mood-altering
substance implicated in violent crimes in our society has been
ethyl alcohol, far more often than the use of illicit drugs.(3)
While violence in the past few years
associated with drug-dealing lifestyles suggest that illicit
drugs contribute to more violence today than such drugs did a
decade or two ago, recent studies still show that most
psychopharmacologically induced violent crimes continue to
involve beverage alcohol.(4)
In addition, studies on family violence suggest as well that
alcohol abuse remains a greater risk factor in such violence
than is illicit drug use (5)
and recent findings also show that beverage alcohol use, rather
than illicit drug use, is more likely related to child abuse,
too.(6)
Although smoking and other forms of
tobacco use may cause 400,000 or so deaths in the United States
annually, published reports by our nation's own epidemiologists
reveal that tobacco-attributed mortality is confined chiefly to
older men and women (7,
8, 9,
10) where
death itself is increasingly quite a normal and expected outcome
at some point for all mortal beings. Some widely-known men and
women who either smoked cigarettes or used another tobacco
product for much of their lifetimes, and therefore might be
deemed by some people as victims of tobacco use, are listed
immediately below along with their age at time of death:
Age at death
Name (in years) Source
-------------------------------- ------------ ------
Albert Einstein 76 (11)
J. Robert Oppenheimer 63 (11)
Sigmund Freud 83 (11)
Thomas A. Edison 84 (11)
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) 75 (11)
Grover Cleveland 71 (12)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt 63 (12)
George Burns 100 (13)
Robert Mitchum 80 (14)
Mike Royko 64 (15)
Deng Xiaoping (Chinese leader) 93 (16)
Victor L. Crawford (see note below) 63 (17)
Jeanne Calment (see note below) 122 (18)
These older individuals listed above
-- all of them users of tobacco -- are not offered as proof
that tobacco use is harmless; a claim that I have never
suggested. In fact, I have stated openly and widely that the
use of tobacco, without any question, is unhealthy.(19)
Rather, they are presented above, along with their age at time
of death, to chiefly illustrate that the vast majority of
tobacco-related mortality occurs in human beings over 60 years
of age; often at a much older age when death could be seen
entirely as a natural event. Further, the long and productive
lives that these tobacco-using individuals had the opportunity
to enjoy also quite clearly illustrate that former U.S. Food
and Drug Administration chief David Kessler's claim that
tobacco use is a serious "pediatric disease" is not
truly an accurate or responsible one unless, of course, one
wishes to also classify the long- time users of tobacco
products listed above as children.
On the other hand, some
not-as-widely-known individuals who either used beverage
alcohol in their young lives or were killed by another
individual using alcohol -- all died prematurely largely as a
consequence of someone's beverage alcohol use if not their own
-- are listed immediately below along with their age at time
of death, too:
Age at death
Name (in years) Source
-------------------------------- ------------ ------
Carrie Clowes 15 (20)
Jean Davis 17 (20)
Tennyson Clark 18 (20)
Amanda Farmer 18 (20)
Virginia Shaffer 7 (21)
Daniel Shaffer 8 (21)
Zachary Shaffer 8 (21)
David Harris 24 (21)
Dana Ogletree 36 (21)
Jamie Cyndra McGee 19 (22)
Scott S. Krueger 18 (23)
Benjamin Wynne 20 (24)
Adam G. Prentice 21 (25)
The young Americans named above,
except for three of them, would likely be deemed as children
by grandparents such as myself. The nine individuals at the
top of this second listing -- seven children and two young
adults -- were Georgia victims of merely two alcohol-related
traffic accidents: one in 1995 and one in 1996. The last four
names listed above are those of college students in the United
States -- merely some of them -- who died prematurely as a
result of their own use of alcohol in 1995 and 1997: two from
alcohol overdose and the other two from alcohol-related falls.
If the use of any mood-altering substance rationally and
rightfully warrants being deemed as a "pediatric
disease" in our society, it is the use of alcoholic
beverages; not that of tobacco products as Dr. Kessler has
suggested misleadingly.
Although you are pursuing litigation
against the tobacco industry to seek reimbursement for
tax-supported health costs attributed to smoking and other
tobacco use, I wish to stress that:
the use of alcoholic beverages -- not
tobacco -- is the leading cause of preventable birth defects in
our country(26,
27) and is
also one of the foremost causes of mental retardation in the
Western world,(28)
ethyl alcohol -- not tobacco -- is the
number-one cause of death for American children and young adults
15 to 24 years of age,(8,
29)
beverage alcohol use in the United
States causes the loss of more years of potential life from
death before age 65 years -- 20% more at that -- than does the
use of tobacco,(9)
nearly one and one-half times more
American school-age children begin using alcoholic beverages
each day than begin cigarette use,(30)
and
the use of beverage alcohol -- not
tobacco -- is the most prevalent common factor associated with
violence, crime and family sociopathy in the United States as
well.(2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 31,
32, 33,
34)
Therefore, in summary, the aggregate
cost to Georgia's taxpayers which results from beverage
alcohol's harmfulness -- e.g., crime, family violence and
dysfunction and alcohol-related diseases among Georgia's
citizens as well as costly accidents from drunken driving, too
-- clearly appear to be a much greater and heavier burden upon
the backs of our state's taxpayers than is the aggregate cost
which results from tobacco use; thus you have even a far more
justified basis to seek reimbursement from the alcohol industry
-- reimbursement considerably larger than that which you seek
from the tobacco industry -- for tax-supported expenditures for
approximately forty percent of Georgia's entire penal facility
construction and operating costs, about one-half or more of all
of our state's social service costs for abandoned, abused, or
otherwise neglected children which result from beverage alcohol
use, those tax-supported costs to provide special education and,
for many, lifetime care and supervision for Georgia's
mentally-crippled victims of FAS -- an irreversible condition --
in addition to the tax-supported costs to provide
institutionalized custodial services for long-term alcoholics
with permanent mental impairment, and tax-supported costs to
also provide health care for the treatment of alcohol-related
illnesses among Georgia's citizens such as cirrhosis of the
liver and cancers of various organs among adults whom drink
heavily together with tax-supported crisis treatment and
long-term rehabilitation expenditures for victims of
alcohol-related automobile accidents as well as alcohol-related
violence that Georgia's taxpayers have become saddled with due
to the beverage alcohol industry's harmful products.
In short, alcoholic beverage use in
Georgia costs our state's taxpayers a great deal more in the
overall picture -- and is also responsible for far more crime
and other costly social problems as well -- than does the use of
tobacco, sir.
While I am thankful for Deputy Attorney
General Brenda H. Cole's recent response to me regarding my
earlier correspondence concerning the litigation that you are
pursuing against the tobacco industry and also my suggestion to
you, first expressed in a letter to you dated May 15, 1997, that
should you pursue such litigation against the tobacco industry,
you should also pursue similar litigation against the alcohol
industry as well as it would not be just to do otherwise; I am
also quite disappointed to learn that your office "lacks
resources to litigate against every entity which contributes to
the ...costs borne by...Georgia citizens" using some of Ms.
Cole's own words to me from her recent letter here.
Therefore, I will now modify my plea to
you as expressed in my previous two letters to you of September
5, 1997, and December 5, 1997, and thus urge you now to bring
such similar litigation against the alcohol industry only.
In other words, I no longer urge you to
file similar litigation against the Georgia Lottery Corporation
-- forget this justifiable target altogether as far as I am
concerned, sir, because the harmfulness to our society from
gambling, while a risk to children, is pale in contrast to that
harmfulness which results from alcoholic beverage use: the
number-one cause of premature death for Georgia's children and
young adults 15 to 24 years of age(8,
29) as well
as the cause of the loss of more years of potential life
resulting from death before age 65 years -- 20% more at that --
than is the use of tobacco, too.(9)
Lastly, since Ms. Cole's reply to me
indicates that your office does not have sufficient resources to
litigate against the alcohol industry, I will therefore do what
I can to persuade leading members of the General Assembly to
either introduce or support legislation this year to provide our
state's attorney general office with sufficient funds to prepare
lawsuits against the alcohol industry for reimbursement of
alcohol-related crime and other alcohol-related social costs as
borne by Georgia's taxpayers similar to the litigation that is
now reportedly being pursued by your office against the tobacco
industry in respect to smoking-related health costs and, as
well, to enact legislation this year to require our state's
attorney general to prepare and file such similar, but more
comprehensive and expanded, lawsuits within a year to force the
alcohol industry to pay its proportional share of
alcohol-related crime and all other alcohol-related social costs
-- alcohol- related health care costs among them, too -- which,
at this time, are placed very unfairly upon the shoulders of
Georgia's non-drinking taxpayers, both rich and poor alike.
Thank you for your attention once
again, sir.
Sincerely,
Cyrus J. Stow, DDS
References:
- "Cost to end
parole could be $6 billion": The Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, Jan. 3, 1998, p. C1.(Of these added costs
to end parole, be they $6 billion over the next ten years or
not, approximately one-half of the costs will be required to
incarcerate offenders of alcohol-related crimes.)
- Kai Pernanen, "The
Social Cost of Alcohol-related Crime: conceptual,
theoretical and causal attributions": National
Institute for Alcohol and Drug Studies, Norway, and Uppsala
University, Sweden. 1995 or later.
http://www.ccsa.ca/pernanen.htm
(The study immediately above cites the following published
source of the data in the table provided in this letter:
Roizen, J. (1981). Alcohol and criminal behavior among
blacks: the case for research on special populations. In J.
Collins (Ed.) Drinking and crime. New York: Guilford Press.)
- Macrio De La Rosa,
Elizabeth Y. Lambert and Bernard Gropper, "Exploring
the Substance Abuse-Violence Connection": Drugs and
Violence: causes, correlates, and consequences. National
Institute on Drug Abuse Research Monograph 103, 1990, DHHS
Pub. No. (ADM)9O-1721, pp. 1-7.
http://calyx.com/~schaffer/GOVPUBS/nidaviol.txt
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- "Cigarette
Smoking-Attributable Mortality and Years of Potential Life
Lost -- United States, 1990": CDC Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report, August 27, 1993, Vol. 42, No. 33,
pp. 645-649.
- "Advance Report of
Final Mortality Statistics, 1991": CDC/National Center
for Health Statistics Monthly Vital Statistics Report,
August 31, 1993, Vol. 42, No. 2, Supplement, pp. 1-61.
- Robert W. Amler and
Donald L. Eddins, "Cross-sectional Analysis: precursors
of premature death in the United States": American
Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1987;3(supplement), pp.
181-187.
- J. Michael McGinnis
and William H. Foege, "Actual Causes of Death in the
United States": Journal of the American Medical
Association, November 10, 1993, Vol. 270, No. 18, pp.
2207-2212.
- World Almanac and Book
of Facts: 1997. ed. Robert Famighetti (Mahwah, NJ:
World Almanac Books, 1996), pp. 348-354.
- Ibid. p. 109.
- "A century of
laughs": The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 10,
1996, p. A1.
- "Farewell":
Newsweek, Dec. 22, 1997, p. 56.
- "Chicago's
Tribune": Newsweek, May 12, 1997, p. 60.
- "Deng Xiaoping
Died on Feb. 19, 1997": Chinese Web Index, Chinascape
http://www.chinascape.org/TopNews/97/deng/index.html
- "Year in Review:
1996": The Boston Globe (internet service)
http://www.boston.com/globe/specialreports/1996/dec/apreview/deaths.htm
(Note: Victor L. Crawford was the American Medical
Association's widely-exhibited former tobacco lobbyist; i.e.
its anti-smoking "poster-boy" of 1995. While it is
indeed regrettable that Mr. Crawford reportedly died from
smoking-related throat cancer at 63 years of age, he still
had the opportunity to live a considerably long and full
life before he died, I suggest, unlike the thousands of
hapless children killed in our nation every year at an early
age from drunken drivers as well as booze-abusing parents
whom, oddly, the AMA's leadership gives far less attention
to in marked contrast to the AMA's frequent and widespread
outspokenness about tobacco use.)
- "Milestones":
Time, Aug. 18, 1997, p. 19.
(Note: until Jeanne Louise Calment died in 1997, this
122-year-old French woman was quite widely known as the
"world's oldest person." Since she reportedly
smoked cigarettes for most of her remarkably long life, she
is also known by many individuals as the "world's
oldest smoker" too.)
- Cyrus J. Stow: open
letter to David Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration, August 5, 1995, pp. 1-4.
(This letter is now posted on the internet, with cited
references, on the following three websites:
http://www.forces.org
http://www.forcesgeorgia.org
http://www.forces-cdn.com
- Doug Payne,
"Teenage driver charged in deaths of sister, 3
others": The Atlanta Journal, Sept. 4, 1996, p. B4.
- Ralph Ellis, "An
empty Christmas": The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
Dec. 22, 1995, p. H1.
- Chris Burritt,
"Student's death illustrates drinking problem at UNC":
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 13, 1995, p. D8.
- Tara Arden-Smith,
"MIT to Add Dorms": Student.Net News, 1997.
http://www.student.com/97/10/03/MITdorms/
- Leslie Zganjar,
"Louisiana investigates student alcohol death":
The Atlanta Journal, Aug. 28, 1997, p. A3.
- Tara Arden-Smith,
"U-Mass Death Linked to Drinking": Student.Net
News,1997.
http://www.student.com/97/10/10/umassdeath/
- Surgeon General's
Advisory on Alcohol and Pregnancy: FDA Drug Bulletin, July
1981, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 9-10.
- Allan B. Weingold,
"High-Risk Pregnancy": Merck Manual of Medical
Information: Home Edition, ed. Robert Berkow, M.D., and
others (WhitehouseStation, N.J.: Merck Research
Laboratories, 1997), pp. 1145-1171.
- "Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome and Other Effects of Alcohol on Pregnancy
Outcome": Seventh Special Report to the U.S.
Congress on Alcohol and Health, 1990, DHHS Pub. No. (ADM)
90-1656, pp. 139-155.
- Carrie Teegardin,
"Drunken driving rates prompt call for crackdown":
The Atlanta Journal, Jan. 8, 1997, p. A3. (This is in
reference to CDC epidemiologist Robert D. Brewers' quoted
statement that drunken driving is
the leading cause of death in the U.S. for individuals under
25 years of age. Whether drunken driving alone or combined
together with alcohol-related family sociopathy resulting in
the death of children constitute
the number-one cause of premature mortality for American
children and young adults 15 to 24 years of age -- or
Americans under 25 years of age -- it should be clear that
beverage alcohol use kills more children in
our country every year than does the use of handguns,
illicit drugs, or tobacco.)
- Lloyd D. Johnston and
others, "Monitoring the Future Study": preliminary
data on youth drug use in the United States as was
released December 15, 1995, by DHHS Secretary Donna E.
Shalala's office.
- Jane Ellen Stevens,
"Treating Violence as an Epidemic": Technology
Review, August/September 1994, pp. 23-30.
- Mark H. Moore,
"Controlling Criminogenic Commodities: Drugs, Guns, and
Alcohol": Crime and Public Policy, ed. James Q.
Wilson (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1983), pp. 125-144.
- Richard J. Herrnstein,
"Some Criminogenic Traits of Offenders": Ibid. pp.
31-49.
- David C. Anderson,
"America Can Control Crime If It Will": Crimes of
Justice (New York: Times Books, 1988), pp. 37-65. (The
origin of sociopathic behavior during childhood in
dysfunctional families where mothers abuse alcoholic
beverages is further supported by the following two case
studies:
Kenneth Wooden, "No Name Maddox: Case History
of Charles Manson": Weeping in the Playtime of Others
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 47-57,
and that of convicted-killer Nicholas Ingram's early
life as reported by Ingram's attorney
Clive Smith, "Witness to execution: `I watched
my friend die'": The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
Apr. 16, 1995,
pp. B1 and B5.
cc:
The Honorable Zell Miller, Governor, State of Georgia
The Honorable Thomas B. Murphy, Speaker, Georgia House of
Representatives
The Honorable Denny Dobbs, Chairman, Georgia House of
Representatives Committee on State Institutions and Property
The Honorable Jim Martin, Chairman, Georgia House of
Representatives Committee on Judiciary
The Honorable Earl L. O'Neal, Georgia House of Representatives
The Honorable DuBose Porter, Chairman, Georgia House of
Representatives Committee on Education
The Honorable Nathan Dean, Chairman, Georgia Senate Committee
on Corrections, Correctional Institutions and Properties
The Honorable Richard O. Marable, Chairman, Georgia Senate
Committee on Education
Linda C. Schrenko, State Superintendent of Schools, Georgia
Department of Education
Jimmie R. Murkerson, President, Georgia Sheriffs' Association
Jim Wooten, Editorial Page Editor, The Atlanta Journal
other individuals (via first-class mail, internet e-mail or
both)
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