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50 free Drugs and Alcohol trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Most of what people think they know about drugs and alcohol arrived by rumour. This quiz is the corrective: what a unit actually measures, what a hangover is made of, why coffee cannot sober anyone up, and which gas in cigarette smoke does the quiet damage. The 50 questions cover the science of how alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, opioids and stimulants act on the brain and body, the history of Prohibition and the Opium Wars, drug laws and schedules on both sides of the Atlantic, the awareness campaigns schools run every autumn, and a few famous cases, from a cocaine-laced soft drink to a cough medicine that should never have been sold. It is built for health classes, workplace awareness sessions and pub quizzes alike: factual, not preachy, with an explanation under every answer. Play it on your phone or print it for the room.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which soft drink did John Pemberton create in 1886 after Atlanta went dry, as a booze-free take on his wine tonic?
Coca-Cola
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.
Q 02Which amendment, the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, repealed US Prohibition in 1933?
21st
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.
Q 03Which stimulant, legal and largely unregulated almost everywhere, is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug?
Caffeine
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.
Q 04Which First Lady's answer to an Oakland schoolgirl asking what to do if offered drugs became a 1980s anti-drug slogan?
Nancy Reagan
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.
Q 05Which October campaign began in DEA agent Enrique Camarena's California hometown after his 1985 murder in Mexico?
Red Ribbon Week
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.
Q 06Which Austrian neurologist praised cocaine in an 1884 paper, 15 years before writing The Interpretation of Dreams?
Sigmund Freud
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.
Q 07Which island was ceded to Britain 'in perpetuity' by the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War in 1842?
Hong Kong
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.
Q 08Pure alcohol provides how many calories per gram, more than carbohydrate or protein but fewer than fat?
7
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.
Q 09Beer stronger than 2.25% stayed banned in which country until 1 March 1989, a date it now celebrates as Beer Day?
Iceland
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.
Q 10Which tier of the US Controlled Substances Act, reserved for drugs with 'no accepted medical use', holds heroin and LSD?
Schedule I
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.
Q 11Which per se drunk-driving limit did Utah adopt in 1983, before it became the norm in every other US state?
0.08%
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.
Q 12Nearly all addictive drugs, by different routes, raise which neurotransmitter in the brain's reward pathway?
Dopamine
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.
Q 13Alcohol is classed as which type of drug, whatever the lively mood a first drink or two produces?
Depressant
Q 21Which compound, first isolated by Raphael Mechoulam in 1964, is the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis?
THC
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.
Q 22Morphine, first isolated from opium by Friedrich Sertürner in 1804, takes its name from which Greek god?
Morpheus
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.
Q 23Opium is the dried latex scraped from the scored, unripe seed pods of which flower?
Poppy
Depressant is the label because alcohol decreases the electrical activity of neurons; the early buzz comes from loosened inhibitions, not stimulation.
Q 14Which Chicago gangster's Prohibition bootlegging empire ended with an 11-year sentence for tax evasion in 1931?
Al Capone
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.
Q 15Which country, led by José Mujica, became the first in the modern era to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013?
Uruguay
Uruguay sells it through licensed pharmacies to registered residents, who are fingerprint-checked at the counter and capped at 40 grams a month.
Q 16Which opioid antagonist, carried as a nasal spray by police and bystanders, can restore breathing after an overdose?
Naloxone
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.
Q 17Which first breakdown product of ethanol, 10 to 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself, drives the worst of a hangover?
Acetaldehyde
Acetaldehyde lingers at an elevated plateau for many hours after drinking, which is why the morning after can feel worse than the night before.
Q 18A healthy adult's blood alcohol falls by roughly how much per hour, a pace no coffee or cold shower can speed up?
0.015%
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.
Q 19Which benzodiazepine, invented by Leo Sternbach at Roche, was America's best-selling medication from 1968 to 1982?
Valium
Valium, the brand name for diazepam, sold more than 2 billion tablets in 1978 alone; it was only the second benzodiazepine Sternbach had invented.
Q 20Which European country decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, referring users to 'dissuasion commissions'?
Portugal
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.
Poppy latex is roughly 12 percent morphine, which is why Papaver somniferum fields are harvested by hand, pod by pod, with a small blade.
Q 24Which mountain range's people have chewed the cocaine-bearing leaf against altitude sickness for at least 8,000 years?
Andes
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.
Q 25Which gas in cigarette smoke binds to haemoglobin about 240 times more tightly than oxygen, starving tissues of it?
Carbon monoxide
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.
Q 26Which scarring of the liver, unlike the fatty-liver stage before it, cannot be reversed even if a heavy drinker quits?
Cirrhosis
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.
Q 27Which US president called drug abuse 'America's public enemy number one' at a 1971 White House press conference?
Richard Nixon
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.
Q 28Which US state, alongside Washington, was the first to legalise recreational cannabis by popular vote in November 2012?
Colorado
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.
Q 29Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, in which Colombian city that also named his cartel?
Medellín
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.
Q 30Which 1919 law, passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto, set the rules for enforcing US Prohibition?
Volstead Act
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.