Book excerpt: "There is no one who doubts that alcohol and other drugs create enormous-and enormously expensive-problems worldwide, and here in the United States. Much of the media coverage in local and national news has focused on the opioid epidemic, and rightly so. Opioids are highly addictive and often lethal. And at the peak of the epidemic, in 2017, overdose deaths from opioids alone, climbed to about 47,000 per year; an astounding number.5,6 More astounding: that same year (and the year before and the year after) nearly twice as many were killed by alcohol"--