European report highlights alcohol danger

Excluding tobacco and caffeine, alcohol is the psychoactive substance used most by young people across the European Union, says the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in its annual report presented to the European Union and its member states.

The report states that the “proportion of 15- to 26-year-old students who have been drunk at some time in their lives ranges from 36 per cent in Portugal to 89 per cent in Denmark (Fig 1).” It notes the growing concern about increased levels of drunkenness and binge use of alcohol for recreational purposes and, citing the example of two very different countries, says that between 1995 and 1999 “marked increases in lifetime experience of being drunk occurred in Greece and Norway (Fig 2)”.

Data are gathered by EMCDDA from all the member states of the EU and Norway. Whilst there are no routinely collected EU data on drug-related hospital emergencies, because of the hidden nature of illicit drug use, the report does note that such data as are available suggest “that alcohol is a greater burden on health services in some Member States than illicit drug use.

WHO estimates that in developed countries alcohol accounts for 10-11 per cent of all illness and death each year.”

For example, a Danish study of young people carried out in 2001 found that fewer 17-year-olds had reported hospital attendance for drug-related problems than for alcohol-related problems. “In Ireland,” says the report, “a regional study of hospital case notes over a three-month period found that almost all of the 55 hospital admissions among young people aged 10-18 were related to alcohol alone or deliberate self-poisonings.”