London Blog Day 4. Paper of the week - drugs, violence and holidaymakers visiting mediterranean destinations.

I spend most of the week browsing through security literature. Because it’s a holiday time, the current paper of the week is ‘Substance Use, Violence, and Unintentional Injury in Young Holidaymakers Visiting Mediterranean Destinations’ from 2001 issue of Journal of Travel Medicine titled. 

Authors used survey (for stats geeks: cross-sectional comparative survey) on airports looking at 6,502 British and German holidaymakers aged 16 to 35 years coming back from Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Result showed that over 95% used alcohol, 66% have reported been drunk, over 10% used illicit drugs, 5.8% suffered unintentional injury and 3.8% have been in physical fight. From those who used drugs, 86.5% smoked cannabis, 31.9% took ecstasy, 18.3% cocaine, 5.8% ketamine, 5.7% amphetamine and 3.8% GBH. British tourists visiting Crete took more drugs and were involved in more violent episodes than tourists visiting other destinations. Also, German tourists visiting Portugal took more drugs than tourists visiting other destination, but not different from British on Crete. Odds for violence were overall highest for Majorca. No other significant differences between Germans and British tourists were reported. Violence was most common for those staying between 8 and 14 days. Also, big surprise, drinking alcohol on holidays was associated both with violence and unintentional injury, while taking drugs - more associated with unintentional injury, as relationship with violence wasn’t clear. Those results don’t seem to apply for tourists smoking cannabis. Discuss.