Almost one in three Europeans has tried illicit drugs in their lifetime, but not all countries are alike in terms of drug use habits or their impact on health.

Regular drug use is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, accidents and infectious diseases such as HIV when it comes to injecting drugs.

According to a recent report by the European Commission (EC) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2024, 15% of young people across the European Union had used cannabis and 2.5% had used cocaine.

EU data show that among all adults, cannabis use is highest in the Czech Republic, Italy, France and Spain, and lowest in Malta, Turkey and Hungary.

Meanwhile, cocaine use is highest in the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland, and lowest in Turkey, Portugal, Poland and Hungary.

Remarkably, according to Sabrina Molinaro, an epidemiologist and director of research at Italy's National Research Council, who is coordinating the European School Survey on Alcohol and Other Drugs, how strict a country's drug policy is does not have a major impact on drug availability - at least for young people.

"The main penalties only affect people who use the substance once or less a year, i.e. not the real [heavy] users," Molinaro told Euronews.

Her study has tracked drug use among 16-year-olds in Europe since the 1990s.

Molinaro said trends in drug use habits across generations are remarkably persistent over time, meaning patterns among today's youth will show up in adult data in a few years.

For example, although teenage boys used cannabis more often than girls in the past, this gap has been narrowing in recent years, with girls' cannabis use even surpassing that of boys in some countries.

Cannabis and cocaine are the two most commonly used illicit drugs in the EU, but other drugs such as MDMA (also called molly or ecstasy), heroin and other opioids, psychedelics and synthetic drugs are a growing risk - and Europe is awash with more drugs than ever, the EU's monitoring agency said earlier this year.

"Synthetic drugs - such as lab-produced cannabinoids and stimulants - are particularly dangerous because it is difficult for national authorities to identify problematic compounds, then ban them and stop traffickers quickly enough," Molinaro said.

According to the EU's anti-drugs agency, hundreds of synthetic drug labs were dismantled in the EU in 2022, and the following year its early warning system detected seven new synthetic opioid substances that were high potency. | BGNES