Alcohol Consumption and Harm among Adolescents in Sweden: Is Smuggled Alcohol More Harmful?

Abstract

As a consequence of Sweden joining the European Union, privately imported alcohol is increasingly sold within illegal contexts (i.e., smuggled alcohol). One implication of the smuggled alcohol is that alcohol becomes more available to underage drinkers. In the Swedish debate, smuggled alcohol has been formulated as a youth problem. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between consumption of smuggled alcohol and alcohol-related harm among adolescents in Sweden. Data on consumption of smuggled alcohol were obtained from monthly surveys, and data on harm originates from the National Board of Health and Welfare. The analysis was made by means of time-series analysis (ARIMA models). The results highlight the importance of overall consumption per se and not the type of alcohol (illegal or not) consumed.

KEYWORDS:

• adolescent drinking
• illegal alcohol
• smuggling
• Sweden
• time-series analysis

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS) grant 2009-1784. The author would like to thank Mats Ramstedt for comments on earlier versions of this article as well as comments from anonymous referees.

Notes

^a Autoregressive integrated moving average models are indicated by, in turns of order, order of autoregressive parameters (AR), order of differentiating, and order of moving average parameters (MA).

*p < 0.05. * *p < 0.01.