Bad habits costing Australians dearly

Alcohol, drugs and tobacco come with a cost: broken homes, broken families, broken lives. There is also a financial cost: for Australia, 56 billion Australian dollars (50 billion US dollars) a year in lost production, crime and accidents.

"That's an enormous amount of money," Health Minister Nicola Roxon was quoted by DPA as saying. In fact, it's more than the 43 billion - 18 per cent of expenditure - that goes into funding the health service each year.

There are some surprises in the figures the government came up with for 2005. The social cost of alcohol was 15 billion, less than half the 31-billion associated with cigarette smoking. Illicit drugs - the scourge that most people think of - cost the community 8 billion.

Roxon, when releasing the figures, said they were a "reminder to us of why it's so important to focus on prevention, why we need to be vigilant in our battle against tobacco, why we need to have more focus on excessive consumption of alcohol, and why we need to continue to make sure that there is a strong battle that we fight on

all fronts against illicit drug use."

The problem, of course, is that it's relatively easy to treat a broken leg and very difficult to persuade people that lifestyle is linked to health.