Alcohol and tobacco will kill you sooner than drugs

NEW YORK: It’s smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol – and not taking illegal drugs – that pose the greatest risks to people’s health, a new international study contends.

Researchers found that alcohol and tobacco use combined cost more than a quarter of a billion disability-adjusted lifeyears worldwide, while illegal drugs only accounted for tens of millions in comparison. Disability-adjusted life-years is a measurement of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost because of ill health, disability or early death.

Worldwide, more than one in seven adults smoke tobacco, and one in five reports at least one occasion of heavy drinking in the past month, the review of 2015 data found.

Central, Eastern and Western Europe have the highest alcohol consumption per person, and the highest rates of heavy consumption among drinkers (50.5%, 48% and just over 42%, respectively), according to the report.

Those same areas also have the highest rates of tobacco smoking – Eastern Europe 24.2%, Central Europe 23.7% and Western Europe almost 21%.

Illicit drug use was far less common worldwide, with fewer than one in 20 people estimated to have used marijuana in the past year, with much lower rates of use for amphetamines, opioids and cocaine, the researchers said. But the US and Canada had among the highest rates of dependence on marijuana. – The New York Times