The latest mortality data from Scotland has just been released by the National Records of Scotland and published on the Human Mortality Database. It strongly suggests another rise in drug-related deaths in 2023 after a big fall in 2022, an increase in deaths by suicide and little change in alcohol-specific deaths.
Separating things out by sex we can see that deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose for men in Scotland in 2023, with little change in women.
In terms of age patterns, things are a bit more complicated, but drug deaths rose in 40-59 year olds, while alcohol deaths rose in 65-79 year olds, with increases in deaths by suicide across 35-65 year olds.
View the code for these plots on Github.
It's worth noting that the official drug death figures are likely to be released in a few weeks, and the alcohol deaths in a month or so. The analysis here is based on Vital Events data which is published earlier, but with slightly less detailed mortality coding than the official cause-specific releases.
This means that, for example, the alcohol-specific deaths are missing a few causes of death that usually account for ~4% of alcohol-specific deaths. As a result, although I'm pretty confident that the patterns in this analysis will match those in the official releases when they come out, the exact numbers might differ slightly.