PODCAST: CT sees the nation’s sharpest rise in alcohol-related deaths

The alcohol-related death rate nearly tripled between 2012 and 2022 in Connecticut. Experts point to a cultural change that has normalized drinking alcohol at events that were historically sober.

WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Kaitlyn Pohly to discuss her article, “Athena nursing home workers say medical bills still going unpaid,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here .

WSHU: What prompted you to look into alcohol-related deaths in Connecticut? And were you surprised by what you found?

KP: Yes, it’s a good question. I’m a rising junior now at Yale, and being a college student, there are substances all over college campuses. I was thinking about social life at Yale and how alcohol and substance-dependent it can really be sometimes. And then, Lantano Recovery, which is the organization that conducted the study that I cited in my article, actually reached out to me with the data that they had found about Connecticut.

And given my personal experience, and also my interest in public health, it felt like an interesting lead to pursue. And, you know, I was really surprised by their study and their findings. When I think about alcoholism in the United States, there are states that come to mind, like Alaska or Wyoming, these more rural states where we see alcohol-related deaths, that are a lot more prevalent in those states. The raw numbers for Connecticut are a lot lower than those for states. But what was really interesting, and what the article is about, is about that percent increase.

WSHU: And what the study found was that there was a 166% increase in alcohol-related deaths in a 10-year period between 2012 and 2022.

KP: Yes.

WSHU: And the spike was during COVID.

KP: Yes, the highest year recorded was 2020.

WSHU: But it didn’t even come down to pre-COVID levels after that.

KP: No, no, it did not.

WSHU: What do they think is responsible for that?

KP: So one of the physicians that I spoke to for the story, Dr. Allen, he works at Hartford Healthcare, and he had a bunch of different hypotheses about why that COVID-related spike kind of persisted even after the height of the pandemic, one of which that I found really interesting was Connecticut’s geographic proximity to really big finance hubs and large metropolitan areas for the country being so close and kind of in between both Boston and New York City. You know, a lot more transport and a lot more commuting in Connecticut than perhaps in other states, either between those two big cities or to one of those cities. And so that was one of the reasons that he thought alcohol-related deaths, a lot of which are drunk driving accidents.

WSHU: We’ve had a spike in drunk driving accidents.

KP: Yes, we have.

WSHU: What did you find as far as the families? How were families coping with this?

KP: It’s difficult in the sense that as opposed to, you know, other illnesses, something like cancer, which is obviously really hard on a family, but you don’t feel a certain sense of guilt or responsibility as a family member the same way you do with alcoholism, which is a disease like any other. And Ms. Carolan, who I spoke to for the story, runs Parent Connection, which is a kind of like a Parent Resource Center.

WSHU: That’s Dorrie Carolan, right?

KP: Yes. So Dorie lost her son to a drug overdose in 1983. She started the company after that and wanted to help parents who were dealing with the same issue she was dealing with. But in the last few years, what she told me was that she’s not seeing opioid-related addiction and people coming in or families coming in with that issue as much as she’s seeing families come in with children dealing with alcoholism or children dealing with alcohol dependency.

What she was saying is that you know, alcohol is so ingrained in every area of our society. It’s embedded in celebration and mourning. Dr. Allen kind of said the same thing. And I spoke to him right after the Fourth of July, and he was like, you know, I was driving by a gas station close to me, and half of the liquor area of the store was sold out after the holiday, because alcohol is so embedded in those celebrations, and it’s become so normalized. And so, for parents who are dealing with this, it’s a lot easier to give your kid a glass of wine at the age of 16. And you might not necessarily realize the path you’re subconsciously leading them down.

WSHU: Also, something that was interesting in your article is a young lady named Lily Geiger, who has decided to market nonalcoholic beverages. Could you tell us about her nonalcoholic beverage and why she decided to do that?

KP: Yeah, well, she has such an interesting story, She kind of grew up her whole life with a father who was dealing with alcoholism. And then he passed away when she was 20 when she was in college. And then, during COVID, actually, she saw how much people were relying on alcohol during quarantine. And, you know, you’d get on a Zoom, and everyone would be having a glass of wine, or there were all these cocktail-making trends on social media. And she saw that people were turning to alcohol as a coping mechanism for being isolated. And she, you know, had the background of seeing what that did to her father.

That was kind of a wake-up call for her. So that’s why she started Figla. I haven’t actually tried it myself, although I really do want to, but what she was saying is that she wanted to create some sort of beverage that could be sipped on at dinner and wouldn’t feel like, you know, you were missing out on something by just like drinking water when everyone else was having a glass of wine, but that it didn’t conjure up the taste of alcohol for people who are in recovery. And so it doesn’t taste like alcohol. However, it can be mixed with a club soda or with a seltzer. And you can still feel like you’re engaging in cocktail culture without having to, you know, actually consume alcohol.

WSHU: Now, something interesting that I saw in your article is how much alcohol-related deaths cost the state of Connecticut because excessive alcohol use, you say, was estimated to cost the state about $3 billion in 2010. It’s now up to $4 billion in 2022. What does that mean?

KP: Yeah, I mean, you see that costs come in many different ways in terms of, for example, traffic collisions, and the impact that has on Connecticut’s roads and the repairs that need to be done. Or on the criminal justice system. If you’re then arresting someone who was driving drunk, then obviously, there’s the cost of putting that person through the criminal justice system. So there are a lot of different ways in which alcohol-related death and alcoholism have an impact on the state.

It also has an impact on productivity. If people are turning to alcohol, they’re going to be less productive in the economy; they’re not going to be showing up to work or providing for their families necessarily, in the same way, because they depend on this substance as a crutch. And I thought that it was a less personal side of alcoholism. But you know, it has an impact on everyone in the state. Nonetheless, not even just a family. One of the people I talked to for the story, Preston Rideout, is like a consultant for nightclubs, and he works with a lot of lawyers who are prosecuting drunk driving credit crimes. He actually said, I think that every drink costs Connecticut like $2.75, which, you know, $2.75 might not sound like a lot, but if one person is maybe having three cocktails at dinner, you know, that really adds up quite quickly.

WSHU: Now, lawmakers tried to do something about this in the General Assembly this year. What did they try to do, and apparently, it didn’t make it?

KP: It didn’t. So they tried to pass a bill in the state that would lower the blood alcohol content legal limit for driving from .08 to .05. Forty-nine states in the U.S. have a legal BAC of .08, so by moving down to .05, Connecticut would kind of be leading the charge in this field or in this in this way. The only other state that has a legal limit of .05 is Utah. It’s not that it didn’t pass, it’s that it ended up getting tabled by the end of the session. However, there’s been a big push to have it reintroduced next year and have it re-debated because the statistics are kind of only getting worse that alcohol-related deaths in the state are continuing to not necessarily increase but continuing to kind of stay at an alarming number.

WSHU: And so, there is a possibility that a bill will get passed next year.

KP: Yes.