BERLIN, April 17 (Xinhua) -- The legal drugs alcohol and tobacco "remain responsible for most of the addiction problems in Germany", according to a report by the German umbrella association for addiction issues (DHS) published on Wednesday.

In Germany, about 74,000 deaths a year were caused by alcohol consumption or the combined consumption of tobacco and alcohol, according to the DHS.

"When it comes to tobacco and alcohol, prevention is particularly important. A strong interaction between situational and behavioral prevention is crucial," the German government's drug commissioner's office told Xinhua on Wednesday.

According to the latest calculations by DHS, German citizens drank around 131 liters of alcoholic beverages per capita in 2017, about two percent less than the previous year.

Despite this slight decline in consumption, however, the association for addiction issues said it was not possible to give the all-clear as "Germany is a country with a high consumption of alcohol".

DHS noted that consumption of alcohol by children and adolescents in Germany remained "at a high level", with 21,721 patients between the ages of 10 and 20 hospitalized for acute alcohol abuse in 2017.

In the same year, the second most common diagnosis in all German hospitals among adults was "mental and behavioral disorders caused by alcohol".

The latest numbers for cigarettes consumed in Germany declined by 1.9 percent to 74.36 billion. The consumption of cigars and cigarillos, however, increased by 6.5 percent to over 3 billion units in 2018.

The German drug commissioner's office told Xinhua that it was advocating for "a comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising".

This was important because "poster and cinema advertising have a considerable influence on the image of smoking, especially among children and young people," the German drug commissioner's office said.

The latest DHS figures also showed that cannabis remained by far the most commonly used illicit drug among both adolescents and adults in Germany.

The report noted that "drug trafficking on the Internet has established itself as a fixed distribution channel for drugs in Germany".

Also classified as potential addiction, legal gambling at slot machines "has increased enormously", with operators profiting from average annual growth rates of 10 percent, according to the report.

The turnover of the legal gambling market in Germany has reached 46.3 billion euros (52.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017. This marked an increase of 2.5 percent compared to the previous year.

Reducing "the consumption of legal and illegal drugs and to avoid drug and addiction-related problems in our society" is one of the German Federal Ministry for Health's main targets.

These addictive behaviors and substances "cause considerable health, social and economic problems in Germany," according to the German health ministry.

Addiction was also problem for companies said German drug commissioner Mortler speaking in Berlin on Tuesday. Mortler stressed that addiction "poses a risk for work histories, a problem for operational processes" and could have "a massive influence on how people work together in the company".

It was therefore essential that German companies "recognize that addiction prevention, early intervention and the support of addicts are not only tasks of the state and the health system, but also of every employer," Mortler concluded.