BODY WATCH : In the End, Their Pain Is Our Pain Too : Safety: As a society, we pay $44 billion in alcohol-related accidents, $39.7 billion in gunshot injuries, and $122 billion a year in drug-abuse cases. It doesn’t have to be this way, the experts say.

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

Once a caveat of affluent snobbery, that popular paradox played a lot better in the affluently snobbish 1980s than it does in the payback-time ‘90s.

Yet Americans show a remarkable penchant for ignoring the high cost to society of how they choose to live their lives.

“People could live a lot healthier and a lot safer than they do. Some people try very hard to do that. Some people don’t,” says economist Ted Miller, associate director of the National Public Services Research Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization. “Some of that is lack of knowledge; some of that is lack of inclination. But the real questions come when people who are behaving safely have to pick up the bill for the people who aren’t.”

For example, injury is the second-largest medical expense in the United States today, Miller says. “It is almost always preventable by being more careful, by fixing safety problems, by using safety devices of proven effectiveness, and by designing better products and homes.”

In fact, all the “costs to society” find their way back to individual Americans sooner or later, in costs of products and services, in costs of insurance, in lower wages from employers who face higher costs. “All of it comes out of our own wallets,” Miller says.

For those asking how much it costs, here are some price tags we as members of society pay, according to Miller and other keepers of such statistics:

* Alcohol-related costs to society, including medical spending, lost wages and lost hours of work, total $128 billion a year, Miller says. That’s the equivalent of 50 cents per drink consumed annually.

* Highway accidents nationally have an economic cost to our country of $112 billion a year, not including lost time, pain and suffering, and quality of life, says Miller. That’s tantamount to a $575-per-vehicle expense.

* Direct cost to the nation for alcohol-related automobile accidents is $44 billion yearly, Miller says.

* The price the public pays for people injured in accidents who failed to buckle their seat belts is $12 billion. “Every adult who uses his safety belt religiously,” Miller says, “currently is paying $110 a year to cover the nonusers.”

* The societal cost of drug abuse is $122 billion a year.

* Tobacco takes a $94.4-billion toll on health care, says the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Eighty percent of substance-abuse costs, it estimates, are related to tobacco.

* Crime is responsible for about a sixth of the mental health care spending in this country, Miller says. Violent crime costs society $50 billion yearly in medical and other factors.

* Unintentional and largely preventable injury accounts for $260 billion annually--about one-eighth of medical care costs, Miller says.

* The injury cost to the public due to nonuse of motorcycle helmets is $375 million a year, which, Miller says, comes to about 40 cents per motorcycled mile.

* Gunshot injuries cost the public $39.7 billion yearly in medical and other expenses. The cost per injuring bullet each of us pays is $8.40, Miller says.

* Child abuse and neglect tag the public for $12.3 billion a year.