MADRID, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The results of a study published by the Spanish National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Science (INTCF) on Wednesday highlighted the role that alcohol or drugs played in provoking fatal accidents on roads in Spain in 2018.
The study considered the cases of the 751 people who died in road accidents in 2018 and who underwent an autopsy to discover the cause of death.
535 of the victims were drivers, 143 were pedestrians and 73 passengers in a vehicle involved in an accident.
The study shows that 43 percent of the drivers (232) who lost their lives had consumed either alcohol, drugs or a psychotropic drug. And 71.1 percent of victims who tested positive had levels of alcohol in their blood above the legal limit, while 44 percent had taken drugs.
Cannabis (59.8 percent) and cocaine (51 percent) were the most common drugs discovered and both drugs were often consumed together with alcohol. Meanwhile, 25 percent of the victims had also taken psychotropic drugs.
There was also an important imbalance between men and women among road accident victims, with 94.4 percent of the 535 drivers tested in the study being men, of whom 67.5 percent of them coming from the age group 25-54.
The study also highlighted how alcohol and drugs also played a part in a high percent of accidents in which pedestrians lost their lives with 38.5 percent of victims testing positive for some kind of substance, although in this case psychotropic drugs (in 52.7 percent of cases) were more common than alcohol (45.5 percent) or illegal drugs (21.8 percent).
