IORTI · Independent research
Iowa is not simply a smaller version of the United States. Most of the things that drive alcohol cost moved differently here, and two of them point prevention work somewhere different.
Prices went up over the decade, but so did the amount of harm. Each bar below answers a different "what if" question.
These three groups overlap — an 18-year-old drinking heavily counts in two of them. That is why they are shown separately and never added together.
Every state's cost, built from the figure published for that state in 2010. Cost per drink is skewed in states where a lot of alcohol is bought by visitors or by people crossing a state line, so read it with care. Click any column to sort.
A cost like this cannot be measured directly — it is built from many separate estimates, and some of the inputs are genuinely uncertain. Rather than hide that, the charts below show what changes when the debatable choices are made differently. These are named scenarios, not a statistical margin of error. Hover any bar to see exactly what was changed.
Each bar changes something about how the cost is calculated. The main estimate is highlighted.
These do not change the total at all — they change only the share attributed to taxpayers. That is why they would look identical on the chart above.