This is claimed to be the world’s largest drug survey, intended “to promote honest conversations about drug use, and help people use drugs more safely regardless of the legal status of the drug.” The interest is not in the levels of use, per se, but in a comparison of use patterns and trends.
Available online are the Global Drug Survey 2021 Key Findings Report, and an Executive Summary. Here, I will extract some of the information as related solely to alcohol. In 2021, there were 32,000 respondents, from 22 countries (each with >160 participants). About one-third of the respondents were from Germany, followed by New Zealand and the United States.
Let’s start with rates of drug use. Here are the percentages of the 32,000 people who had used each of the listed drugs during the previous year. Clearly, alcohol predominates; but cannabis and tobacco both get more than 50% usage. Compare this to my youth, when huge numbers of people smoked tobacco, but no-one admitted to smoking cannabis, except university students!
As far as alcohol is concerned, the majority of the respondents were categorized as low-risk drinkers (on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, developed by the World Health Organization). This does not mean that people do not like a drink, or two. This next graph shows the number of days on which alcohol was reported to be consumed within the previous 12 months, for several of the countries.
There is nothing too unexpected there. The French drink on average every 3 days, and the Hungarians every 4 days. However, the Germans are below the global average; and the New Zealanders drink notably more often than do the Australians.
There is also, of course, the matter of getting drunk — defined as “having drunk so much that your physical and mental faculties are impaired”. This next graph shows the number of occasions, within the previous 12 months, reported by members of several of the countries. The survey average was 9 times, which is about once every 40 days.
Moreover, those Australians in the survey managed about twice the global average rate, with the Danes and Finns not that far behind, along with the Americans. The Germans, Spaniards and Italians clearly drink in moderation, along with the New Zealanders. That is, Australians drink less often than New Zealanders, but when they did drink they were more likely to keep drinking.
After getting drunk, it is always possible to feel regret about this activity. This next graph shows the percentage of occasions on which the participants “wished you had drunk less or not drunk at all.” This generally seemed to vary between about one-fifth and one-quarter of the occasions.
The Danes and Finns seem to have the fewest regrets, in spite of leading the way in drinking, while the Australians regretted much more — maybe this is why they drink less often than New Zealanders — they drink less often but get drunk more often, and then regret it. The Irish and Poles had the most regrets.
There must, of course, be a reason for having regrets, and a number of reasons were provided, as listed in the next graph. Each person was asked “to think back over the occasions they have regretted getting drunk and select their top three reasons for why this happened.” The graph shows the percentage of people who selected each reason as first, second or third. The lesson here is not to drink your alcohol too fast, nor to mix your drinks.
Getting drunk is never recommended. After all: 1 in 5 deaths of US adults 20 to 49 is from excessive drinking; and even: In young adults, moderate to heavy drinking is linked to higher risk of stroke. Worse still, we have been told that the: Alcohol death toll is growing, due to the ongoing pandemic.
You can have a drink or two, but not five or six.
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