GAYS COST SOCIETY 3X MORE THAN SMOKERS
Colorado Springs: The Centers for Disease Control announced that smoking costs society about $168 billion a year. The CDC said the $168 billion annual bill was the sum of direct health costs of $76 billion and $92 billion in lost productivity. Since about 23% of adults – about 23 million smoke, that translates into a cost of about $7,300 per smoker each year.
Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, a Colorado Springs based think tank, is conducting interviews comparing gay vs. smoking work-related losses.
Said Dr. Cameron, “Gays are costing about $51 billion a year for AIDS alone, much less all the other diseases more frequently experienced by homosexuals.” However, there are many times more smokers than gays. Cameron continued, “The 1996 CDC national sexuality survey estimated that 1.3% of men engage in homosexual activity each year. Even if there were as many as 2 million sexually active gays – that would translate into a cost of over $25,000 per gay per year – just for AIDS. The total cost, including the other STDs and organ failures that gays acquire, is obviously much higher.”
“Smoking and homosexual activity are recreations,” said Dr. Cameron. “Yet everyone ends up paying for these unhealthy choices.” The CDC national sexuality survey reported that smokers did not differ from non-smokers in frequency of missing work, yet 34% of gays vs. 19% of straights missed a day or more of work in the last 30 days. “The health effects of smoking usually hit later in life,” noted Dr. Cameron, “there is little evidence that smoking interferes with productivity during the working years. But the diseases associated with the homosexual lifestyle hit early and hard. They are a large part of the reason that homosexuals live 20 years less than straights. And when you die in your 30s, or 40s, you won’t even repay society’s costs for raising and educating you.”
The report on gay lifespans and the corroborative CDC material is in the April, 2005 issue of the refereed scientific journal Psychological Reports (Volume 96: pp. 693-697). The CDC report on the costs of smoking are in the July 1, 2005 MMWR (Volume 54(25): pp. 625-628). Analysis of the CDC national sexuality survey is in the June, 2005 issue of Psychological Reports (Volume 96: pp. 915-961).