Online Tools

Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application
To assist professionals in state and local public health departments in estimating the impact of alcohol-attributable deaths (AAD) and years of potential life lost (YPLL)—a measure of premature death—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded the development of the Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application. Originally released in 1989, ARDI was specifically designed to allow states to calculate AAD, YPLL, direct health care costs, indirect morbidity and mortality costs, and non-health-sector costs associated with alcohol misuse.

In 2002, with support from a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Alcohol Program in CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion began updating ARDI and migrating it to the Internet to be more accessible to state-based epidemiologists and other users. In September 2004, the new version of ARDI was released in conjunction with a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report article entitled Alcohol-Attributable Deaths and Years of Potential Life Lost — United States, 2001. That report highlighted that approximately 75,000 AAD occurred in 2001 resulting in approximately 2.3 million YPLLs. In February 2008, additional years of data were added, which resulted in 5-year average annual estimates of health effects based on the years 2001–2005.  This was done to produce more stable estimates than can be obtained from a single year of data.  In December 2013, the data in ARDI were updated once again to provide average annual estimates of AAD (88,000) and YPLL (2.5 million) for 2006-2010.

ARDI includes reports for all 50 states with options to view each report by gender and age groups. Since the original release in 2004, ARDI has been enhanced to include reports specifically focused on individuals younger than 21 years of age. In addition, the custom data feature has been enhanced to make it easier for users to conduct sub-state (e.g., county-level) analyses of alcohol-attributable deaths and YPLL.

Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS)
Managed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS) provides detailed information on 35 state and federal alcohol policies in the policies. These policies fall under the following categories:

• Alcohol beverages pricing
• Alcohol control systems
• Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits
• Health care services and financing
• Pregnancy and alcohol
• Retail sales
• Taxation
• Transportation
• Underage drinking

APIS is intended to support alcohol policy research and public health practice in preventing excessive alcohol use. APIS also provides a variety of informational resources of interest to alcohol policy researchers, public health practitioners, community coalitions, and others involved with alcohol policy issues. The system is based on in-depth legal research conducted by attorneys with special expertise in alcohol policy. APIS is updated annually, and the list of policies being tracked by the system is updated periodically on the basis of researchers' and public health practitioners' needs.

Consumer Costs and Job Impacts from State Alcohol Tax Increases

The Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends increasing alcohol taxes based on strong evidence that this can reduce excessive alcohol consumption and related harms. However, questions have been raised about the potential impact of alcohol tax increases on the cost of alcohol to individual drinkers and on state employment. To help answer these questions, the Alcohol Program in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded a research collaborative involving the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Florida, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Boston Medical Center. This new web tool was developed based on these research findings to model how much extra adult drinkers would pay for alcohol following various hypothetical state alcohol tax increases based on how much they drink, income, and employment status, as well as the effect these hypothetical tax increases would be expected to have on state employment.