This many people in the UK die from substance misuse every month

Somewhere on the web there lives a fascinating visualisation that shows live drug and tobacco use going on right now in America, where the numbers under each heading such as ‘inhalant use’ and ‘cocaine use’ begin to climb as soon as you enter the site.

Of course, it’s not really ‘live’ in the sense that it’s counting individual incidents of drug use across the U.S., rather it’s based on statistics. So if the statistics say that an individual takes cocaine somewhere in the US every 2 seconds, then every 2 seconds the number under ‘Cocaine use’ goes up.

(Perhaps most worryingly, since I loaded the page a few minutes ago, 350 guns have been bought).

But what would a similar visualisation look like for the UK? For starters, the numbers would be a lot smaller – we only have a measly 6 million compared to the US’s 316. You’d also imagine that the number under Guns Purchased wouldn’t climb much. Also, the visualisation wouldn’t look very pretty, at least if Fast Forward did it. We lack the proper design and programming skills.

So here’s some good old-fashioned text based statistics for you :

1. Roughly 100,000 people per year die from smoking in the UK, or just under one person every five minutes.
2. In England and Wales, someone is sentenced for knife possession once every 30 minutes.
3. Over 8,000 people die from alcohol related illness in the UK each year, or roughly one person every hour.
4. In 2012, 52 people died in the UK from complications arising from taking legal highs, or one person every week.
5. On average in 2013, 18 individuals died from heroin/morphine complications in Scotland every month (which is less than those who die from methadone, incidentally.)

So now imagine the past month of your life, during which you may have eaten about 90 meals, slept for roughly 210 hours, and spent 3,570 minutes staring at your smart phone. In that time:

1. Over 8,765 people in the UK died from smoking.
2. 730 in the UK died from alcohol abuse.
3. 1,460 people in England and Wales were sentenced for knife possession.
4. 4 people died from legal highs UK-wide.
5. And 18 died from heroin/morphine in Scotland.

Now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

 

 

References:

All statistics are either borrowed at face value from the following websites, or were calculated using the statistics on the websites.

1. Smoking: http://www.patient.co.uk/health/smoking-the-facts
2. Alcohol: http://www.drugscope.org.uk/resources/faqs/faqpages/how-many-people-die-from-drugs
3. Knives: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/knife-possession-sentencing-quarterly
4. Legal Highs: http://www.drugscope.org.uk/resources/faqs/faqpages/how-many-people-die-from-drugs
5. Heroin: http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/files2/stats/drug-related-deaths/2013/drugs-related-deaths-2013.pdf