New Study Reveals Australians Take More Drugs than Britons

New study reveals Australians take more illicit drugs than the Britons do.

A University of Adelaide report discovers that more Australians are into illicit drugs than are the Britons, but the latter leads in terms of abusing alcohol and smoking tobacco.

The research based on global data finds that because Australians are drinking less, they are also less likely to abuse alcohol than Britons or Americans. In fact, only 3.7 percent of Australians, according to the study, are considered to suffer from alcohol disorder versus 12.1 percent of the Brits and 7.8 percent of Americans.

But Australians lead in terms of illicit drug use, with some favorites- cannabis, opioid-type medications, including morphine and codeine and ecstasy.

The new study discovered that 10.3 percent of Australians were smoking cannabis at least once in a year versus only 5.7 percent of Britons. And compared with the Brits between 1.1 and 1.7 percent, three percent of Australians used ecstasy at least once in a year.

The study also revealed that 2.1 percent of Australians used amphetamine type of drugs, at least once within a year period versus between 0.7 and 1.2 percent of Britons.

Top rankers in the study were still alcohol and tobacco smoking, proving they’re still two world leaders in substance addiction.

Associate professor and lead author Linda Gowing said that the data they presented revealed the significant impact of illicit drugs in Australia and that alcohol and tobacco remained the most common addiction in the country, but there was also illicit drug use.

She furthered, what the data revealed was that it was important that they keep their strategies on alcohol and tobacco and that they were doing quite well on those, while they also needed to give attention to illicit drug use that could be substantial.

Gowing said that this new data could be used by policymakers when tackling addictions. According to her, if people would look into what the prevalence of addiction are in countries, then they could try and tease out what was happening, including the factors influencing use patterns and  it could useful in addressing the addiction problem in Australia.