Swedes run up €600m sex, drugs and booze bill

Swedes spend about €603m a year on prostitutes, illegal drugs and black-market alcohol and tobacco, the country’s statistics agency revealed today.

The estimate was produced by Statistics Sweden at the request of Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, as part of an effort to get an overview of the economic value of such transactions in the different EU countries.

Some EU countries already include these figures in their gross domestic product, but Sweden does not.

According to the estimate, which Statistics Sweden noted was “very uncertain”, Swedes annually spend about €250m on drugs and €65m on prostitutes.

Sweden has a population of nine million.