Drinks and drugs capital of the world? (WS)
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Hello. For the next 10 minutes, you're with more or less a dollop of statistical cream on the overripe strawberry of news. I'm Angela Saini. First up, more or less listener Dave Hurley was reading The Economist recently when he came across this surprising fact.
Palau has the highest rate of cannabis use on earth, with nearly a quarter of adults from 15 to 64 lighting up.
Palau is a tiny Micronesian island home to just 21,000 people. But despite its size, this wasn't the first time David heard about it.
This comes after a WHO report in 2011 showing that Palauans drink more beer than any other nationality too.
Now, as Dave continues, this begs an important question.
Is Palau really a paradise for beer-swilling stoners or is there something about the tiny Pacific island that is making statisticians look like they've been smoking funny cigarettes?
Time to bring in our intrepid reporter.
Charlotte MacDonald. Well, both cannabis and alcohol figures Dave mentions come from highly respectable sources. Let's take the beer statistic first. As Dave said, a recent World Health Organization report did indeed put Palau at the top of the global per capita chart of beer-drinking nations. The thing is, that's not quite the whole story. The WHO compared data from 2005, and for some reason, Palauans appear to have gone on a massive drinking spree that year. They just drank a lot more beer than usual in 2005. But there's another more important point to make here. While they seem to drink a lot of beer in Palau, it looks like they don't drink much of anything else.
What surprising statistics claim Palau leads the world in beer and cannabis use?
Which means when you look at the total amount of alcohol consumed, rather than just beer, Palau slips all the way down to 42nd place.
Although there are nearly 200 states in the study, which means that 42nd place is still pretty high. Now, purely because I suspect some listeners will be wondering which country is at the top of the list for all alcohol consumption.
It's actually the Czech Republic. Now, cannabis. The statistic which caught listener Dave's eye is that a quarter of Palawan adults are using it, which sounds like a lot. The Economist got the figure from the UN's World Drug Report, which has just been published. The two countries with the second highest cannabis usage are Italy and New Zealand. There, the report says, about 15% of adults are using it.
So not only are more people in Palau than anywhere else smoking cannabis, but they're ahead by a long, long way. Exactly.
But digging a little deeper into the figures, it turns out the UN weren't able to obtain survey data for adults in Palau. So instead, they used a survey of high school pupils and they extrapolated those results to get a figure for the whole adult population.
Now, to me, that sounds like somewhere an error could quite easily creep in. I mean, you would expect teenagers to smoke more dope than, say, middle-aged women.
Yeah, exactly, you would. And Palau is tiny, remember. In fact, it only has one state high school. So we're talking about a pretty small sample. But for what it's worth, the surveyors found that 60% of the teenage respondents in that state high school had used cannabis at least once. And almost 40% said they had used cannabis in the last month. So not just a high school, but a really high school. Well, quite. But just for comparison, a similar survey of school kids is carried out in the US. And there, only 23% of students say they used cannabis in the last month.
So what do Palauans think about that statistic that a quarter of the adult population has used cannabis?
Yeah, they're not too pleased about it. I put the statistics to Emery Wente. He's a director for the Ministry of Education on Palau.
Palau is a very small island. If that is the case, you see it, you smell it everywhere. You don't. You don't really see it. You don't smell it. And like I said, this is a very small island. You sort of know just about everybody.
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