Is Hungary really a world-leading country in alcoholism?

Drinking is a problematic habit in Hungary, but does it really affect as many people in population proportion as a new map suggests?

The World Population Review webpage has published a clickable map showing the percentage of the population affected by alcoholism in each country this year, but as telex.hu reports it could be misleading.

The page states that Hungary tops the list of the top 10 countries with the highest rates of alcohol abuse disorder/alcoholism, with 21.2 percent of the Hungarian population affected in 2023. It also states that Hungary has the highest rates of alcoholism in males in joint first place with Russia at 36.9 percent.

But how could a relatively small webpage gather accurate data for 2023 if it’s only April? Well, it couldn’t. As telex.hu points out, the report is misleading, as it presents data from the WHO from 2016 as if it was gathered in 2023.

Still, the 2016 data is accurate and with the trend that sociologists and addictologists identify is an alarming one, as there was no sign of change in drinking habits in Hungary since 2016.

Old data is not wrong data

Qubit.hu writes that the last comprehensive survey of the Hungarian population’s drinking problems was conducted in 2019, and the results were published in 2021 in the volume entitled Addiction Problems in Hungary.

Sociologist Borbála Paksi and addiction specialist Zsolt Demetrovics write that in 2018, 12 percent of men and only 1 percent of women in Hungary was classified as problematic drinker.

The proportion of survey respondents who had drunk alcohol at least weekly in the month prior to the survey was significantly higher. A quarter of the adult population – 40 percent of men and roughly 10 percent of women indicated that they consumed alcohol in a weekly manner.

Qubit also reports that according to a 2020 study, the proportion of severely alcohol-dependent people in Hungary is close to 10 percent, compared to the 3.7 percent average in the European Union.

This figure clearly shows that even if the World Population Review map is not the most recent one, it illustrates the systemic social problems, and it is no coincidence that Hungary is pictured as a large blue patch in the middle of Europe.

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