Pick your poison: It's possible now to see a menu of bad behaviors--and their respective costs!

The price of bad choices can be pretty steep.

It seems like there's a commercial value to everything these days--include bad behavior.  When the costs are calculated for five societal problems, you might be surprised to learn that a pack of cigarettes really might run as much as $150, murder costs are over $17M, and alcohol is rated worse than conventional drugs.  

Researchers around the world have been working on econometric studies that estimate the costs of various crimes, cigarettes, as well as drugs and alcohol--in effect, producing a price list of social ills.  If you're interested, the rank order and cost of crimes [i.e., cost to victim, criminal justice system, lost productivity, and other public expenses] are as follows:  murder [$17,250,000], rape [$448,532], armed robbery [$335,733], aggravated assault [$145,379], burglary [$41,288].  

Do you know which is most destructive:  Heroin, cocaine, or alcohol?

Order of costs to society rated by UK's Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs descend from alcohol--by far--followed by heroin, and crack cocaine.  

These data raise the question as to whether consumers involved in such activities actually know and appreciate the true cost of their actions; the answer is likely no.  Even when it comes to consumption behaviors, the user is probably never "sovereign" enough to fully understand the full costs of the pleasures sought.

There a price tag for everything.

This to me is fascinating--giving a commercial value to bad stuff.  After all, we always know what the ostensibly good things in life cost--there's always a price-tag on the shoes, the BMW, the mansion, and the fine-dining, but never on the shady items; now we've got a better sense of what's paid for that's not so wonderful!

But it's potentially a little more complicated than that, however.  I'd really hate for these costs to drive law- or public policy makers to use these figures to justify greater governmental expenditures to pay for quixotic measures to curb or preclude--what, in the last analysis, may be entirely unpreventable in human terms.  

What is the cost of other things the rest of us do?

It also makes me curious as to what the cost of some less dramatic but entirely targetable other products or behaviors might be: watching TV, sun-tanning, driving beyond the speed limit, consuming Twinkies or Happy Meals!  On second thought, maybe it's better not to know.  In some way's it's more interesting to know the costs of what one doesn't traffic in, not the ones one does!  

[Blog note:  The Wall Street Journal's "Number Guy," Carl Bialik, reported on this genre of research a few days ago--I'll post his story on the KMOB's Facebook Page for you to have easy access to.]

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