This presentation will provide an overview of the effects of drinking on public health and also will identify opportunities to diminish the negative impacts caused by drinking. The global burden of disease model will be highlighted as the most appropriate method for assessing the overall well-being of the population. The basic measure of public health is the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), which incorporates both premature mortality and continuing illness/disability into a single measure. The leading risk factors for mortality and DALYs, including alcohol use, will be presented. The presentation will compare the relative roles of the risk factors across developed and developing nations. The results of these comparisons will highlight the immensely deleterious impact of alcohol use at the population level. The recognition of the severity of the effects caused by alcohol use provides an opportunity to move public health in a quantum leap fashion by focusing on altering alcohol use and its associated ecological systems. There are relatively limited options for population-level interventions to ameliorate alcohol’s impact, although some, such as taxes, are quite cost effective. However, it is quite costly to conduct large field trials of new or innovative alcohol-related interventions. There is another opportunity to move the field of alcohol-related public health interventions forward through the development of accurate simulations of the alcohol ecological system. A simulation model would allow for the pre-testing of current and new practices to identify promising interventions that could then be field-tested.