Yeah, 2 years old as well though. National Drugs Strategy Household Survey - I have no idea how it is (or if it is) adjusted for confounders, but it's a government source.
Sorry for brief response, on a mobile.
The new NHMRC guidelines came out in 2009, and then were quite heavily advertised and promoted - the new levels of safe consumption were about half of the 2001 guidelines ( well, seemed to be a halving of fun to me).
Presumably the survey is conducted to test the effectiveness of the change and the subsequent media advertising of alcohol and it's effects.
I don't think the argument that alcohol causes x many ED presentations versus illicit holds too much water, because that's about size of exposure, not relative risk. If 10,000 people in a catchment drink heavily on Saturday night and 10 show up in ED, there might be only 100meth users of which 1 show up in ED every few days - by definition meth users are going to be on the periphery. I'm using "users" as addicts really as opposed to the trucker use who are almost using it medicinally - they'd use caffeine if meth wasn't available.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing the reason for using meth is shorter acting - caffeine keeps you awake for a long time after dosing, and pseudoephedrine is now much harder to get over the counter.
There's some irony - are truckies now using illicit drugs because the govt has made pseudoephedrine too hard to get?