Addiction Calculator

Addiction not only causes a great deal of suffering, social problems, and difficulties maintaining relationships, it can also significantly shorten your life. This addiction calculator tells you what your life expectancy would be if you were addicted to several different drugs, and how much shorter this is compared to the average life expectancy.

A substance use disorder (SUD) is a medical condition that occurs when one's use of alcohol or drugs leads to health issues or problems at work, school, or home. SUD is a group of mental, physical, and behavioral symptoms that cause various problems related to the areas mentioned above. Substances involved in SUD are:

• Alcohol;
• Phencyclidine;
• Inhalants;
• Stimulants;
• Cannabis;
• Opioids;
• Tobacco;
• Sedatives, hypnotics, and anxiolytics.

Drug addiction is an element of substance use disorders. It is a brain disorder where a person's behavior leads to an inability to control the use of a drug or (even legal) medication. The condition is manifested by compulsive substance use despite the harmful consequences.

Our tool considers the following substances:

• Alcohol — the average alcoholic drinks 2.15 "standard drinks" per day.
• Cigarettes — 20 cigarettes every day.
• Cocaine — one gram per day, split into 6 doses.
• Methamphetamine — 5.3 hits per day.
• Heroin — 3 injections per day.
• Methadone — 4 pills per day.

Methadone is the drug of choice when treating heroin or narcotic painkiller addiction. The drug is also an opioid and is used to treat extreme pain. Due to the recent increase in the number of methadone prescriptions, as well as a rise in its illegal use, there have been reports of methadone-related deaths. In this addiction calculator, we concentrate only on methadone as an illegal substance, not as a treatment prescribed by a physician.

To use the tool, simply choose a substance from the drop-down list and enter the daily dose of the respective drug and the age at which the habit is picked up. Select your country to get an accurate value for life expectancy (Wikipedia comes to the rescue, as always).

This calculator is based on data retrieved from clinical studies or research papers, according to which:

• Alcohol — shortens your life by 6.5 hours.
• Cigarettes — cuts your life by 14.1 minutes.
• Cocaine — removes 6.6 hours of your life.
• Methamphetamine — reduces your life by 9.2 hours.
• Heroin — takes 24 hours off your life.
• Methadone — shortens your life by 14.7 hours.

The time lost listed above is the time lost for each dose that a lifelong addict takes.

Special acknowledgments go to Treatment4Addiction, which aggregated and analyzed data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, as well as other sources.

There are a few areas where the data behind this calculator is not perfect — the statistic for average life expectancy includes addicts (and people who died at an early age) and the fact that a shorter lifespan isn't only related to health issues but also to accidents, crime-related deaths, etc. This is all based on statistical data — so particular cases may be far from the average.

The calculator was instead designed to raise awareness about the gravity of the problem. Please feel free to fill in the numbers and share them on Facebook or Twitter using the "link to this result".