U.S. Leads World in Substance Abuse
The United States may be the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”, but it also holds the title as the world’s leaders in substance abuse, according to a recent study released by the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
Ironically, countries with less-stringent drug laws have lower rates of abuse, as compared to the U.S. who has a high legal drinking age, and some of the strictest illegal drug enforcement policies in the world.
The study also found a marked difference in illegal and legal drug use among the different socioeconomic subgroups in each country. “The use of drugs seems to be a feature of more affluent countries,” researchers discovered.
54,068 people in 17 countries were surveyed, and discovered that 16.2 percent of United States citizens had experimented with cocaine – a rate astoundingly higher than the second place country, New Zealand, where only 4.3 percent of their citizens admitted to cocaine consumption.
Americans were again the winner in the use of cannabis, or marijuana, with 42 percent of survey participants agreeing to having used the drug. New Zealand closely follows the US with 41 percent usage, Dr. Louisa Degenhardt and colleges of the University of New South Wales in Sydney also found.
United States citizens also love their tobacco products, and according to the study 74 percent of participants had used tobacco at some point in their lives, however, current U.S. smoking rates are at a low 21 percent. Other countries life-time smoking rates were lower with Lebanon clocking in at 67 percent, Ukrainians at 61 percent, and Mexico closing in on 60 percent admitting to having ever smoked or used tobacco.
Throughout their face-to-face interviews, researchers uncovered that alcohol was the most commonly used substance by participants. “Alcohol use by age 15 years was far more common in European countries,” researchers found, with 99 percent of Europeans saying they had tasted alcohol, as apposed to 93 percent of Americans.
U.S. National Institutes of Health director Dr. Elias Zerhouni reiterates that “drug use is a still a major problem in this country, pointing to the need for more effective prevention interventions.”
