Examining Current Trends in Addictive Substance Abuse Among Youth: Study on Prevalence of Emergency Service Interventions and Drug-Related Crime in the Slovak Republic

Youth substance abuse represents a complex social and security problem which cannot be adequately captured solely through crime statistics. In the context of the Slovak Republic, there is a lack of systematic research linking healthcare data on intoxications with criminological indicators, which limits the effective design of preventive measures. The research analyses substance abuse (according to ICD 10 F10–F19) among youth in the NUTS 3 regions of the Slovak Republic during 2019–2024 and their descriptive association with drug-related crime. Analysis is based on data provided by public administration entities—the National Health Information Centre of the Slovak Republic (data on youth hospitalisation), the Operational Centre of the Emergency Medical Service of the Slovak Republic (data on EMS call-outs) and the Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic (data on crime). The provided data represent the whole population of the Slovak Republic. To enable comparison between datasets, two standardised indices are constructed: an EMS index representing a number of EMS call-outs and urgent hospitalisations per 100,000 inhabitants of the respective youth age group and a crime index representing a number of drug-related criminal offences per 100,000 total regional inhabitants. A total of 4486 emergency interventions with F10–F19 diagnoses were identified, with the highest proportion being disorders caused by alcohol (F10), more common among juveniles (14–17) than in minors (6–13). The analysis identifies a moderate positive association between the regional EMS index for F10 and F11–F19 diagnoses (correl youth = 0.66; correl juveniles = 0.55) and a weak negative association between the F11–F19 EMS index and the drug-related crime index (correl youth = −0.28; correl minors = −0.52). The Pearson correlation coefficients are reported as descriptive indicators. Formal statistical inference was not the aim of this study. The findings suggest that crime statistics alone inadequately reflect the health risks of youth substance abuse, underscoring the need to link healthcare, criminological, and demographic data and to develop regionally targeted prevention.