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Brian Owens 'recent comments on medical students' excessive drinking in CMAJ and the new National Wellness Program of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS) should be widely supported [1]. Nearly 50 years ago, the first scientific reports on alcohol drinking among medical students were published. For example, in a 1971 survey of 749 medical students at the University of Glasgow, McKay and colleagues documented that the half of the students regularly drank alcohol. 22% of the students who regularly drank alcohol also took drugs. At that time, the final sentence of the BMJ study was [2]: “This report may present problems for the subjects, for the investigators, for the University, and not least for the community, but the urgent need for an appraisal of its public and professional implications constitutes the overriding consideration.”
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A further investigation of Herity et al. with 753 medical students of the University College Dublin during the academic years 1972/73 and 1973/74 confirmed the alcohol problem area [3]. 75% of the students drank alcohol regularly and it was observed that the prevalence of alcohol consumption increased significantly during the first medical years. (1st: 63%; 3rd: 77.5%; 4th: 88.6%). Psychoactive drug-taking of the medical students was also significantly associated with alcohol consumption in this study. Possible higher rates of excessive drinking pattern in medical students compared to peers in the general population...Competing Interests: None declared.