Binge Drinking what can we do ?

[Caro]

What are the tax rates on alcohol in France then? Do you have a link?

it's quite complex, there are various taxes that apply on the product and on the place where it is sold from (for example clubs are not allowed to sell drinks under a certain price).

There's an extremely interesting site if you can read French
Various pages on alcohol consumption, regulations, taxation, etc and comparison between European countries.
Don't have much time to summarise the most interesting stuff, but a fact caught my attention: in the study, 14.4 % of French people say they have been drunk at least once in the past 12 months... I bet in the UK it would be more like 12 hours

[Twirly]

Re. the differences in alcohol consumption and attitudes between France and the UK. Afraid that I don’t have the source, but my father is forever quoting some article he read/programme he saw about how and when alcohol is consumed.

Basically the Brits went down the pub, and just drank, without food. But the French tended to have wine with their meals, and when consumed with food, alcohol is absorbed by the body differently (more slowly I think). So in tests on both groups, although they drank the equivalent amount, the Brits had higher blood alcohol than the French.

Caro, does that sound familiar? Or is there a binge drinking element in France too?

This would suggest that it’s the attitudes towards alcohol that need to be worked on, probably in schools. It’s not necessarily the consumption of alcohol itself that’s the problem, more the when and how – i.e. the binge drinking. One reason that this has increased, particularly amongst young women, has bee the development of alocpops. Cheap, sweet flavoured drinks that are supposed to appeal to the female palate (can’t abide them myself )

[Barry Shnikov]

What can we do?

Um - it's high spirits among people who generally don't have the intellectual equipment or haven't had the opportunity to discover a) how much more fun other forms of entertainment are and b) how dangerous it is drinking enough booze to kill your liver.

Should we make booze more expensive? I don't like that solution: if I want to buy a bottle of wine, or beer, or whisky, it is already the second most expensive in Europe, why should I have to pay even more in order to deter morons?

The cigarette experiment shows that people will continue to indulge in drugs/fail to fight off their addiction even while the price goes statospheric, so that's another reason not to go that route.

The recent report suggests that 24 hour licensing is working in the right direction; needless to say it will need half a generation or so for its effects to begin to show clearly.

Rather than raise the age limit, I think we should abandon it in all places where food is served at tables and where there are two (one?) adults in the party. Or something like that - I haven't worked out the details but the point is off-licences would be excluded, and so would what might be called dedicated drinking environments and night clubs; if adults want to take their kids out for a meal and let them have alcohol, let them do it. Let kids get used to drinking shandy or watered-down wine with mummy and daddy, and then the ability to go and buy your own when you are 18 is not going to seem nearly so seductively exciting as it did say, when I became tall enough to look like an 18 year old.)

It is hard to resist suggesting the prohibition of alcopops. Making teenage girls take their alcohol either neat (where it is definitely an acquired taste) or mixed with large quantities of sickly mixers like coke or lemonade or - yeeach - blackcurrant) will slow them down. Putting neat alcohol in highly sweetened and strongly fruity-flavoured fluids has certainly fuelled the ladette phenomenon. If not banning alcopops, severely restrict the alchohol content to 1% or something. (Of course, there's a definition problem - when is a bottle of purported 'vodika' mixed with purported 'orange' an alcopop and when is it just a quick and easy way of serving vodka and orange?)

School lessons featuring live (well, sort of live) livers taken from people who have died from alchohol induced cirrhosis, or better still visits to hospital wards where children can see the purple, green and yellow flesh of patients who have experienced liver failure might help. It's possible to look fashionably thin and glamorous while suffering from lung cancer but not from liver failure.

[ElaineB]

It has to be attitude to drink that has to change and it may be that taxing alcohol more heavily will help.

When I talk about attitude, I work with some people who seem to think it is incredibly funny to witness one of their colleagues so out of his head that he doesn't know where he is or what he is doing. He does this on a regular basis and the aftermath is some sort of sport in the Office.

My daughter who is 20 and at Uni tells me that a lrage majority of the students seem to drink most evenings and a number of those have much more than the 'safe' limit. They also binge drink at week-ends. Bearing in mind that most of the students are 'poor', this has to relate to the cheapness of the booze that is available. At the local store, they can buy two bottles of wine for £5.00 and 'happy hour' and 'student nights' are pushed by the pubs and nightclubs in that area.

Elaine