Binge drinking grows

Binge drinking, a perennial problem on American college campuses, is a growing concern in other parts of the world as well, especially Europe.

Last month, the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit published a report that binge drinking is a growing problem, especially among young people in the United Kingdom.

Defining binge drinking as consuming the equivalent of four pints of beer by a man or three pints by a woman, the Interim Analytical Report for the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy said 40 percent of men’s drinking sessions and 22 percent of women’s can be termed binge drinking.

The Strategy Unit also linked bingeing to up to 22,000 premature deaths each year, roughly 60 per day, and estimated the cost to the country at $33 billion a year.

Five days before the British report, students at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., learned of the death of a senior who authorities say had been drinking for more than 12 hours before he died.

According to Henry Wechsler — a Harvard researcher who last year published “Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses” — two of every five students at U.S. colleges regularly indulge in binge drinking.

Mr. Wechsler said such drinking is responsible for the death of about 14,000 students per year in the country — mainly from alcohol-related accidents.

In Europe, too, binge drinking is becoming more popular among young people.

In 1999, the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Drugs, conducted among about 95,000 10th-graders by the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs, found that binge drinking had increased by 21 percent between 1995 and 1999 to 55 percent in almost half of the 30 participating countries.

But while 40 percent of 10th-graders in the United States report consuming alcohol in an average 30-day period, 61 percent report doing so in Europe. However, this proportion varies among European countries, from 36 percent in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to 85 percent in Denmark.

Even in Western Europe, drinking habits differ among neighboring countries. With a pure-alcohol consumption of 9.1 quarts per capita a year in 2000, Britons drink less than most of their neighbors, at the head of which is Luxembourg, with 12.7 quarts, followed by Ireland, at 12.2 quarts.

However, the British drink more in one sitting. Among 15-year-olds in Britain, one in three admit to having been drunk at age 13 or younger, while among French and Italian 15-year-olds, one in 10 admits to the same.

The Strategy Unit’s report says this situation can be explained by the difference in drinking culture between northern and southern Europe.

It says the Mediterranean drinking culture is based on wine, especially as a regular part of the diet and mostly consumed in family settings. In these societies, there are “strong informal sanctions against public drunkenness.”

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