Comment: Action vital on binge drinking

Mar 28 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

THE latest figures on children’s alcohol consumption are about as worrying as they can get for parents. A detailed survey by the Centre for Public Health, Liverpool John Moores University, shows a third of Merseyside youngsters – around 57,000 teenagers in the North West – binge drinking on a weekly basis.

Astonishingly, the average teenager is putting away up to 67 bottles of wine, or 269 pints of beer, every year.

These are shocking statistics, and reveal a problem not confined to any one social or geographic demograph.

Britain’s binge drinking problem has been well documented; many European tourist destinations loathe the habits of “Brits Abroad”.

But it seems that our children are learning from the examples they see around them – in their own families, on television programmes or online, and among their own peer groups.

It is a culture that can damage not only the health of an individual, but one that can destroy a family and blight communities. Merseyside police can net dozens of young drinkers when they carry out one of their periodic swoops on Merseyside parks.

Staff at local accident and emergency departments have previously warned about the worrying numbers of young people brought in incapacitated by alcohol.

Britain’s attitude to alcohol has never been as sensible as it is on the Continent.

And children are bombarded by mixed messages – whether it is 24-hour drinking or laws that allow 16-year-olds to marry but not buy the Champagne to celebrate. And let’s not forget spirit-based drinks packaged and sweetened to taste like fizzy pop.

This is a study which gives a valuable insight into the rocky road the region’s young people have started down. What is needed now is the funding to research and produce a comprehensive action plant to tackle it, and the will and determination to ensure it succeeds.

Otherwise, we may as well call time on Childhood.