No this rubbish AGAIN? Thread/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/25/english-and-scottish-get-drunk-most-often-25-nation-survey-finds

Two years ago there was some journalism so bad I have included it in a talk I do about junk stats ever since. The claim was that Brits get drunk more often than anyone else. 2/

This was based on data from the Global Drugs Survey. The same survey was used to make the highly improbable claim that 74% of Brits had used cocaine and that 70% wanted to legalise hard drugs. 3/

The problem is that the Global Drugs Survey is a non-random internet survey of substance users which explicitly says it should not be used to estimate prevalence in the population. 4/

The same is true of this year's edition. Most of the respondents are under the age of 25, for goodness sake. https://www.globaldrugsurvey.world/s3/Global-Drug-Survey-2021 5/

Last time, the only newspaper to mention this important fact, albeit buried towards the end of the article, was The Guardian. This time it hasn't even done that, although it did find space to quote someone calling for minimum pricing and mandatory health warnings on booze. 6/

Nor does the Evening Standard mention it. 7/ https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/england-scotland-drunk-global-drugs-survey-b900988.html

This year's survey finds that 94% drink alcohol (national prevalence is 79%), 60% smoke tobacco (national prevalence is 15%) and 31% take cocaine (national prevalence is 3%). It's meaningless. 8/

With regards to alcohol, the only thing this survey shows is that, of an unrepresentative sample of substance users, respondents in England and Scotland reported getting drunk more times than those in the other 30 countries. / END