Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments.

According to the same study, even though digital piracy inflicts additional costs on the production side of media, it also offers the main access to media goods in developing countries.

For more than a decade, New York's real estate markets, housing policies and welfare rules have conspired to manufacture homeless families, thereby inflicting immense social and financial costs.

Legal drugs would inflict new costs in terms of health care and lost productivity, not to mention broken lives.

Desirable as those results would be, the air and ground campaign required to achieve them would inflict unacceptably high costs on the Iraqi people, Mideast regional stability and American troops.

The research group asserted that the agency had inflicted "staggering costs upon the American consumers" by delaying for years before permitting new services like cellular telephones or satellite-delivered radio broadcasting services.

But childhood cancer, even when its young victims are cured, can inflict wrenching costs on children and their families, whether its toll is measured in financial, emotional or physical terms.

"I do believe these sanctions can inflict such costs."

The group said the forests of the tropical world are disappearing at a rate of about 27 million acres a year, inflicting severe economic, social and enviromental costs on 56 developing countries.

By holding the line against such odds, the black miners demonstrated that if they cannot yet shape a settlement, they can inflict great costs.