Drugs and Alcohol Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Drugs and Alcohol trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Most of what people think they know about drugs and alcohol arrived by rumour. This quiz is the corrective: what a unit actually measures, what a hangover is made of, why coffee cannot sober anyone up, and which gas in cigarette smoke does the quiet damage. The 99 questions cover the science of how alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, opioids and stimulants act on the brain and body, the history of Prohibition and the Opium Wars, drug laws and schedules on both sides of the Atlantic, the awareness campaigns schools run every autumn, and a few famous cases, from a cocaine-laced soft drink to a cough medicine that should never have been sold. It is built for health classes, workplace awareness sessions and pub quizzes alike: factual, not preachy, with an explanation under every answer. Play it on your phone or print it for the room.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which soft drink did John Pemberton create in 1886 after Atlanta went dry, as a booze-free take on his wine tonic?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola was Pemberton's answer to local prohibition, and its recipe kept cocaine from fresh coca leaves until 1903. The company switched to 'spent' leaves, then a cocaine-free extract.
Q 02Which amendment, the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, repealed US Prohibition in 1933?
21st
The 21st is also the only amendment ever to repeal another, wiping out the 18th after nearly 14 dry years. Utah cast the deciding ratification on 5 December 1933.
Q 03Which stimulant, legal and largely unregulated almost everywhere, is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug?
Caffeine
Caffeine has an average half-life of about five hours in healthy adults, so half of an afternoon coffee's dose is still in the blood at bedtime.
Q 04Which First Lady's answer to an Oakland schoolgirl asking what to do if offered drugs became a 1980s anti-drug slogan?
Nancy Reagan
Nancy Reagan's reply, 'just say no', gave her anti-drug campaign its name after pupils in Oakland started a club under the slogan. Betty Ford's name went on a rehab clinic instead.
Q 05Which October campaign began in DEA agent Enrique Camarena's California hometown after his 1985 murder in Mexico?
Red Ribbon Week
Red Ribbon Week began as people in Camarena's hometown wore ribbons in his honour, and it is now observed every October in schools across the United States.
Q 06Which Viennese neurologist praised cocaine in an 1884 paper, long before he turned to psychoanalysis?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud urged cocaine on a close friend as a cure for morphine addiction; the friend became hooked on cocaine instead, and the episode tarnished Freud's medical reputation.
Q 07Which island was ceded to Britain 'in perpetuity' by the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War in 1842?
Hong Kong
Hong Kong Island went to Queen Victoria as a crown colony, the price the Qing paid for losing a war sparked by Britain's opium trade. Macau was already Portuguese.
Q 08Gram for gram, pure alcohol has nearly twice the calories of sugar and is beaten by only which nutrient?
Fat
Fat packs 9 calories a gram against alcohol's 7 and sugar's 4, which is why a night's drinking adds up faster than people expect.
Q 09Beer stronger than 2.25% stayed banned in which country until 1 March 1989, a date it now celebrates as Beer Day?
Iceland
Iceland let wine and then spirits back in, but kept strong beer banned for fear that the cheaper drink would mean more drinking.
Q 10Which tier of the US Controlled Substances Act, for drugs with 'no currently accepted medical use', holds heroin and LSD?
Schedule I
Schedule I is the top tier of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, while cocaine sits a rung below it in Schedule II because surgeons still use it as an anaesthetic.
Q 11Which per se drunk-driving limit did Utah adopt in 1983, before it became the norm in every other US state?
0.08%
0.08% became the US norm only after 1983, when Utah was the first state to drop from the old 0.10% standard; Utah then went first again, down to 0.05%, in 2018.
Q 12Nearly all addictive drugs, by different routes, raise which neurotransmitter in the brain's reward pathway?
Dopamine
Dopamine surges in the nucleus accumbens are what make a drug reinforcing, whether it is a stimulant, an opioid or a drink. Repeated floods of it are what the brain adapts to.
Q 13Alcohol is classed as which type of drug, whatever the lively mood a first drink or two produces?
Depressant
Q 21Which compound, first isolated by Raphael Mechoulam in 1964, is the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis?
THC
THC is one of at least 113 cannabinoids identified in the plant; Roger Adams had made it from CBD in 1942, but Mechoulam's team was the first to isolate it from cannabis itself.
Q 22Morphine was named by its discoverer Friedrich Sertürner after Morpheus, the Greek god of what?
Dreams
Dreams were Morpheus's realm, and Sertürner chose the name because his drug, thought to be the first alkaloid ever isolated from a plant, tended to send people to sleep.
Q 23Opium is the dried latex scraped from the scored, unripe seed pods of which flower?
Poppy
Poppy pods are slit by hand once the petals fall, and the gum that dries on them is the raw material for morphine, codeine and heroin.
Depressant is the label because alcohol decreases the electrical activity of neurons; the early buzz comes from loosened inhibitions, not stimulation.
Q 14Which Chicago gangster's Prohibition bootlegging empire ended with an 11-year sentence for tax evasion in 1931?
Al Capone
Al Capone was suspected of buying special treatment in his first federal prison, so in 1934 he was moved to newly opened Alcatraz, where the syphilis he had long carried wore him down.
Q 15Which country, led by José Mujica, became the first in the modern era to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013?
Uruguay
Uruguay sells it through licensed pharmacies to registered residents, who are fingerprint-checked at the counter and capped at 40 grams a month.
Q 16Which opioid antagonist, carried as a nasal spray by police and bystanders, can restore breathing after an overdose?
Naloxone
Naloxone, sold as Narcan, blocks opioid receptors for only 30 to 90 minutes, shorter than many opioids last, so a revived person still needs medical care.
Q 17Which first breakdown product of ethanol, more toxic than alcohol itself, causes the facial flush some drinkers get?
Acetaldehyde
Acetaldehyde builds up when the enzyme that clears it works slowly, a trait most common in people of East Asian ancestry, and it is also thought to add to hangovers.
Q 18Coffee and cold showers do nothing to sober a drinker up, so what alone lowers blood alcohol?
Time
Time is the only cure because the body clears alcohol at a steady pace of roughly one small drink an hour; coffee just makes a wide-awake drunk.
Q 19Which benzodiazepine, invented by Leo Sternbach at Roche, was America's best-selling medication through the 1970s?
Valium
Valium, the brand name for diazepam, sold more than 2 billion tablets in 1978 alone; its forerunner Librium was an accident, its calming effect noticed only when the compound was tested in 1957.
Q 20Which European country decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, referring users to 'dissuasion commissions'?
Portugal
Portugal kept drugs illegal but made possession of up to a ten-day supply an administrative matter, a public-health bet aimed at the HIV epidemic among injecting users.
Q 24Which mountain range's people have chewed the cocaine-bearing leaf against altitude sickness for at least 8,000 years?
Andes
Andes communities still chew the leaf and drink it as tea; the oldest evidence of the habit turned up in house floors in Peru's Nanchoc Valley. The leaf is under 1 percent cocaine.
Q 25Which gas in cigarette smoke binds to haemoglobin about 240 times more tightly than oxygen, starving tissues of it?
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide locks onto haemoglobin as carboxyhaemoglobin, which is why a smoker's blood carries less oxygen to the heart and muscles than a non-smoker's.
Q 26Which scarring of the liver, unlike the fatty-liver stage before it, cannot be reversed even if a heavy drinker quits?
Cirrhosis
Cirrhosis develops in only 10 to 20 percent of people who drink heavily for a decade or more, though more than 90 percent of heavy drinkers get a fatty liver first.
Q 27Which US president called drug abuse 'America's public enemy number one' at a 1971 White House press conference?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon's words gave the press its 'war on drugs' headline, and two years later he folded federal drug enforcement into a single new agency, the DEA.
Q 28Which US state, alongside Washington, was the first to legalise recreational cannabis by popular vote in November 2012?
Colorado
Colorado's Amendment 64 led to the first state-licensed retail shops, which opened their doors on 1 January 2014, a year before Alaska and Oregon followed.
Q 29Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, in which Colombian city that also named his cartel?
Medellín
Medellín was overlooked by La Catedral, the prison Escobar had built to his own design and walked out of in 1992; police shot him on a rooftop in the city the following year.
Q 30Which 1919 law, passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto, set the rules for enforcing US Prohibition?
Volstead Act
The Volstead Act defined an 'intoxicating beverage' as anything over 0.5 percent alcohol, which outlawed ordinary beer along with whisky. It took its name from Andrew Volstead, the Minnesota congressman who managed it.