50 Fun Facts About Drugs and Alcohol

Which soft drink did John Pemberton create in 1886 after Atlanta went dry, as a booze-free take on his wine tonic?

Coca-Cola was Pemberton's answer to local prohibition, and its recipe kept cocaine from fresh coca leaves until 1903. The company switched to 'spent' leaves, then a cocaine-free extract.

Which amendment, the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, repealed US Prohibition in 1933?

The 21st is also the only amendment ever to repeal another, wiping out the 18th after nearly 14 dry years. Utah cast the deciding ratification on 5 December 1933.

Which stimulant, legal and largely unregulated almost everywhere, is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug?

Caffeine has a half-life of three to seven hours in healthy adults, so half an afternoon coffee is still in the blood at bedtime. It is the rare psychoactive substance no country seriously restricts.

Which First Lady's answer to an Oakland schoolgirl asking what to do if offered drugs became a 1980s anti-drug slogan?

Nancy Reagan's reply, 'just say no', went unnoticed at first before becoming the slogan of her husband's drug campaign. Betty Ford's name went on a rehab clinic instead.

Which October campaign began in DEA agent Enrique Camarena's California hometown after his 1985 murder in Mexico?

Red Ribbon Week began as people in Camarena's hometown wore ribbons in his honour, and it is now observed every October in schools across the United States.

Which Austrian neurologist praised cocaine in an 1884 paper, 15 years before writing The Interpretation of Dreams?

Sigmund Freud's paper on the palliative effects of cocaine grew out of his early research in cerebral anatomy, long before the couch. The Interpretation of Dreams did not appear until 1899.

Which island was ceded to Britain 'in perpetuity' by the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War in 1842?

Hong Kong Island went to Queen Victoria as a crown colony, the price the Qing paid for losing a war sparked by Britain's opium trade. Macau was already Portuguese.

Pure alcohol provides how many calories per gram, more than carbohydrate or protein but fewer than fat?

7 calories a gram puts alcohol closer to fat, at 9, than to sugar, at 4, which is why a night's drinking adds up faster than people expect.

Beer stronger than 2.25% stayed banned in which country until 1 March 1989, a date it now celebrates as Beer Day?

Iceland had ended full prohibition decades earlier, but strong beer stayed illegal until the Althing relented in May 1988. Spirits and wine were legal; a pint was not.

Which tier of the US Controlled Substances Act, reserved for drugs with 'no accepted medical use', holds heroin and LSD?

Schedule I is the top tier of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, while cocaine sits a rung below it in Schedule II because surgeons still use it as an anaesthetic.

Which per se drunk-driving limit did Utah adopt in 1983, before it became the norm in every other US state?

0.08% became the US norm only after 1983, when Utah was the first state to drop from the old 0.10% standard; Utah then went first again, down to 0.05%, in 2018.

Nearly all addictive drugs, by different routes, raise which neurotransmitter in the brain's reward pathway?

Dopamine surges in the nucleus accumbens are what make a drug reinforcing, whether it is a stimulant, an opioid or a drink. Repeated floods of it are what the brain adapts to.

Alcohol is classed as which type of drug, whatever the lively mood a first drink or two produces?

Depressant is the label because alcohol decreases the electrical activity of neurons; the early buzz comes from loosened inhibitions, not stimulation.

Which Chicago gangster's Prohibition bootlegging empire ended with an 11-year sentence for tax evasion in 1931?

Al Capone was convicted on five counts of income-tax evasion on 17 October 1931 and sentenced a week later to 11 years in federal prison; he reached Atlanta penitentiary the following May and Alcatraz in 1934.

Which country, led by José Mujica, became the first in the modern era to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013?

Uruguay sells it through licensed pharmacies to registered residents, who are fingerprint-checked at the counter and capped at 40 grams a month.

Which opioid antagonist, carried as a nasal spray by police and bystanders, can restore breathing after an overdose?

Naloxone, sold as Narcan, blocks opioid receptors for only 30 to 90 minutes, shorter than many opioids last, so a revived person still needs medical care.

Which first breakdown product of ethanol, 10 to 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself, drives the worst of a hangover?

Acetaldehyde lingers at an elevated plateau for many hours after drinking, which is why the morning after can feel worse than the night before.

A healthy adult's blood alcohol falls by roughly how much per hour, a pace no coffee or cold shower can speed up?

0.015% an hour means a drinker at twice the 0.08% limit needs more than ten hours to reach zero; coffee only makes a wide-awake drunk.

Which benzodiazepine, invented by Leo Sternbach at Roche, was America's best-selling medication from 1968 to 1982?

Valium, the brand name for diazepam, sold more than 2 billion tablets in 1978 alone; it was only the second benzodiazepine Sternbach had invented.

Which European country decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, referring users to 'dissuasion commissions'?

Portugal kept drugs illegal but made possession of up to a ten-day supply an administrative matter, a public-health bet aimed at the HIV epidemic among injecting users.

Which compound, first isolated by Raphael Mechoulam in 1964, is the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis?

THC is one of at least 113 cannabinoids identified in the plant; Roger Adams had made it from CBD in 1942, but Mechoulam's team was the first to isolate it from cannabis itself.

Morphine, first isolated from opium by Friedrich Sertürner in 1804, takes its name from which Greek god?

Morpheus, god of dreams, lent his name to Sertürner's 'morphium' because of the drug's tendency to cause sleep. It is thought to be the first medicinal alkaloid ever isolated from a plant.

Opium is the dried latex scraped from the scored, unripe seed pods of which flower?

Poppy latex is roughly 12 percent morphine, which is why Papaver somniferum fields are harvested by hand, pod by pod, with a small blade.

Which mountain range's people have chewed the cocaine-bearing leaf against altitude sickness for at least 8,000 years?

Andes communities still chew the leaf and drink its tea daily in their millions; the oldest evidence of the habit turned up in house floors in Peru's Nanchoc Valley. The leaf is under 1 percent cocaine.

Which gas in cigarette smoke binds to haemoglobin about 240 times more tightly than oxygen, starving tissues of it?

Carbon monoxide locks onto haemoglobin as carboxyhaemoglobin, which is why a smoker's blood carries less oxygen to the heart and muscles than a non-smoker's.

Which scarring of the liver, unlike the fatty-liver stage before it, cannot be reversed even if a heavy drinker quits?

Cirrhosis is the end of the line for alcoholic liver disease, developing in 6 to 14 percent of men who drink more than 60 to 80 grams of alcohol a day.

Which US president called drug abuse 'America's public enemy number one' at a 1971 White House press conference?

Richard Nixon's words gave the press its 'war on drugs' headline, and two years later he created the DEA by executive order as a single command for that war.

Which US state, alongside Washington, was the first to legalise recreational cannabis by popular vote in November 2012?

Colorado's Amendment 64 led to the first state-licensed retail shops, which opened their doors on 1 January 2014, a year before Alaska and Oregon followed.

Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, in which Colombian city that also named his cartel?

Medellín was home to the cartel Escobar founded in 1976, which by the 1980s was shipping an estimated 70 to 80 tons of cocaine a month into the United States.

Which 1919 law, passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto, set the rules for enforcing US Prohibition?

The Volstead Act defined an 'intoxicating beverage' as anything over 0.5 percent alcohol, which outlawed ordinary beer along with whisky. It took its name from Andrew Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who managed it.

In the US, a spirit's 'proof' equals what multiple of its alcohol by volume, a scale born of old gunpowder tests?

Double the ABV makes an 80-proof whisky 40 percent alcohol; the old test soaked gunpowder in spirit and called it 'proof' if the powder still burned.

One UK unit of alcohol, the measure used in official drinking guidelines, equals how much pure alcohol?

10 ml (8 grams) is about what an average adult can process in an hour, so a 750 ml bottle of 12 percent wine holds roughly 9 units of the 14-unit weekly guideline.

Coffee keeps you alert by blocking the brain's receptors for which naturally sedating chemical?

Adenosine is the brain's own brake pedal, and coffee's whole trick is to park in its receptors so the brake never quite engages.

Which country became the first in the world to ban smoking in all enclosed workplaces, pubs included, on 29 March 2004?

Ireland's ban covers bars, restaurants, clubs, offices, company cars, taxis and vans, and is strictly enforced. Scotland followed two years later.

Which country was first to force cigarettes into logo-free, drab dark brown packs, from 1 December 2012?

Australia's researchers tested colours on young people and found Pantone 448 C, an olive-brown, to be the least attractive of all. The olive industry objected to calling it olive.

Which Swiss chemist took the first intentional LSD trip on 19 April 1943, a date now celebrated as 'Bicycle Day'?

Albert Hofmann deliberately swallowed what he assumed was a cautious dose of the compound he had first made in 1938, then tried to ride his bicycle home from the Sandoz lab as the effects took hold.

Which 1936 film, financed by a church group as a warning to parents about cannabis, became a cult comedy decades later?

Reefer Madness was originally titled Tell Your Children, and an improper copyright notice left it in the public domain for 1970s campus screenings.

Which spirit's 18th-century London craze prompted Hogarth's 1751 print of a drunken mother letting her baby fall?

Gin Lane, paired with the cheerful Beer Street, was issued to back the Gin Act of the same year, which pushed sellers into licensed premises.

Which anise spirit was banned in France in 1915 over fears it drove drinkers insane, a law not repealed until 2011?

Absinthe's wormwood was blamed for hallucinations that modern studies say it never caused; its fearsome reputation was mostly down to the alcohol.

Whose 1985 Soviet anti-alcohol campaign shut 600 liquor plants and caused a sugar shortage as home brewing soared?

Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign raised vodka, brandy and wine prices by 20 to 30 percent and tore up vineyards, while sugar sales jumped 18 percent as citizens distilled their own.

Which organisation did Candace Lightner found in 1980 after a repeat drunk driver killed her 13-year-old daughter?

MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, began in California after the hit-and-run driver who left Cari's body at the scene turned out to have a fresh DUI arrest.

Alcoholics Anonymous dates its birth to 10 June 1935, the day a surgeon in which Ohio city took his last drink?

Akron surgeon Bob Smith was Bill Wilson's first recruitment success, and the 1939 book they wrote with other members gave the fellowship its name.

The 1984 US law pushing states to a drinking age of 21 threatened to cut 10 percent of what federal money?

Highway funding was the lever because Washington cannot set a drinking age directly; Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands kept 18 and simply took the cut.

Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid driving recent US overdose deaths, is roughly how many times more potent than morphine?

50 to 100 times morphine's strength is why a few milligrams can kill; US deaths involving synthetic opioids rose from 2,600 in 2011 to over 70,000 in 2021.

Which stimulant, sold over the counter as Pervitin, was handed out by the millions of tablets to German troops in 1940?

Methamphetamine in Pervitin form went to tank crews and aircrew alike, until deaths and side effects ended mass distribution to servicemen in April 1941.

Heavy drinkers risk Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by a shortage of which B vitamin?

Thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency causes the syndrome, and in the United States it is usually secondary to prolonged alcohol abuse rather than diet alone.

The WHO's cancer agency rates alcoholic drinks in which carcinogen category, alongside tobacco smoke and asbestos?

Group 1 means 'carcinogenic to humans' on sufficient evidence, the verdict the IARC first reached for alcoholic beverages in 1988 and later extended to the ethanol in them.

Who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, pushing the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act with lurid 'Gore Files'?

Harry Anslinger collected stories of cannabis causing crime and violence while ignoring evidence that pointed elsewhere, and took them to Congress as testimony.

Which synthetic opioid, developed in Germany in the late 1930s, is given daily in clinics to relieve opioid cravings?

Methadone was the work of Gustav Ehrhart and Max Bockmühl, and a daily dose relieves both cravings and withdrawal symptoms, which is why clinics dispense it one day at a time.

Which Chinese pharmacist, trying to quit his own habit, invented the modern e-cigarette, first made in Shenyang in 2004?

Hon Lik's first device was sold as 'Ruyan', and he later spent eight years as chief executive of Dragonite International, a company he co-founded.