ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of alcohol consumption patterns around the world, and is provided for who have little previous knowledge of the consequences of and attempts to reduce alcohol misuse, as well as people in need of an overview of recent global research in this area. It reviews key findings about patterns of alcohol consumption and, more importantly, patterns of alcohol misuse around the world. The chapter outlines some of the most prominent of these harms, focusing on those that illustrate the range of social problems that alcohol is associated with, as well as those harms that have received the greatest attention from researchers. It discusses the harms which were selected because of their societal importance, their prominence in the literature, and the availability of informative related case studies. The chapter focuses on what is perhaps the most prevalent contemporary framework for theorizing about alcohol's social harms: the public health perspective.
