A recent report released by the Health Minister reveals that our drug habits cause costs of around 56 billion dollars in Australia each year. To put this into context, the Commonwealth spent just less than 43 billion on health last year. This is almost one fifth of the Commonwealth’s total annual expenditure.

However even this huge amount fails to account completely for the true costs of our drug habits. The report analysed the dollar value cost of sickness, disease, premature death, reduced productivity, crime and accidents as caused by the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other illegal drugs. The real costs are more than the sum of dollars misdirected.

Aside from the cost of repairing health, there is the direct cost of purchase. Drugs are expensive, and every dollar spent on drugs is a dollar not spent on bread or bills let alone savings. Drugs can and do cost individuals and whole families their lifestyle in the present and into the future by maintaining their poverty.

The report also doesn’t take into account the immense amount of personal pain that is being experienced. The function of drugs is to avoid feeling discomfort albeit briefly. Unfortunately, when used habitually, drugs become the cause as well as the “solution” for distress, binding people into an endlessly downward spiral that accelerates under the weight of shame and frustration.

Another cost that this report can’t account for is the price of opportunity lost, both individually and collectively. Drugs facilitate the avoidance of challenges for a huge proportion of people. It is impossible to know how many potential Nobel Prize laureates found a pub on the way to university and accordingly missed their test.

The cost of our habit of hiding behind drug use beggars belief. Like living on credit card debt, the practise is unsustainable. The Commonwealth’s appropriate response is to pay for prevention to save on the cost of cure.

The solution however remains in the hands of each individual. Ultimately the easiest action is to simply stop doing the addictive activity. From that point it is possible to accumulate some healthy success.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary life member of the Australian Counselling Association. He has a Counselling and Hypnotherapy practice on the Northern Beaches. Phone 9973 4997.