



Young, primed and loaded


A dangerous binge-drinking culture is emerging among young people and leading to an increase in alcohol-fuelled violence, writes Melissa Davey.

"We're seeing a different type of binge drinking culture, where people are deliberately drinking to get drunk rather than just hanging out with friends" ... Professor Mike Daube.


His band will be playing in Kings Cross at about 11pm, but lead singer, Jack Booker, is in no rush to get there. The drinks are expensive and when he arrives, ''You see the beginning of it, the crowds getting drunk, the aggression''.

Instead, the 25-year-old and his band have gathered at his house in Erskineville. They've bought some beer from a cheap store down the road.

''No one wants to start their night drinking in the Cross,'' Booker says.

''It's much more relaxed this way,'' agrees Courtney Print, 25, the guitarist.

But Australia's largest study into alcohol-related nightlife crime released this week found ''pre-loading'' on alcohol before heading out is also causing crime, violence, hospitalisation, assault and death.

People who drank between six and 10 standard pre-drinks compared with those who did not pre-drink were twice as likely to get into trouble, the researchers from Deakin University in Melbourne found.

The co-chairman of the National Alliance for Action on Alcohol, Mike Daube, acknowledges there is nothing new about people waking up with hangovers.

''But what has changed in recent years is the way we drink and the severity of some of those consequences,'' Professor Daube says.

''We're seeing a different type of binge drinking culture, where people are deliberately drinking to get drunk rather than just hanging out with friends and realising they've drunk too much several hours later.''

More young people were now abstaining from alcohol than in the past, he says, but those who were drinking did so in more risky ways.

The problem has become so pervasive that a new body, the NSW/ACT Alcohol Policy Alliance, has been formed to address the problem. The alliance of health and police groups predicts there will be 300 deaths, 12,000 hospitalisations and almost 7900 assaults linked to alcohol over the next three months.

''The fact is young people have more freedom than before,'' Professor Daube says.

''They have more access to money, they have more access to alcohol, there are more sweet, palatable products produced especially for them and it's heavily promoted. Put all of those together with more sales outlets selling cheaper alcohol and it is easy to see why young people are being harmed more seriously than before.''

Also troubling experts is parents buying alcohol for underage kids to consume at home.

Fairfax Media has interviewed the parents of a 16-year-old girl who attended a party where the host's parents supplied alcohol. When the girl's father picked up his daughter, she was passing out from excessive drinking. The parents of the host hid upstairs.

When he asked his daughter to type their home address into Google maps so they could find their way home, she was too drunk to push any buttons on the phone.

The father took her back inside and asked the teenagers what she had taken that night and where their parents were.

''The kids said there were no parents, that they didn't know what she had taken,'' the father says.

He took the girl to hospital to be told she should sleep it off. ''We took her home and observed her overnight,'' the mother says. ''And when she woke up, she cried and said, 'Mum, there's a couple of hours I don't remember'.

''I had to tell my daughter how to check herself over for signs of sexual assault. It was awful.''

As she checked her body, a teenage host of the party wrote on Facebook: ''My parents heard your dad calling for help last night.'' That was when the girl's parents realised the host's parents had been home the entire time. They went to the police to press charges, which are still being investigated.

It is a reality seen by Sandra Jones, who is director of the Centre for Health Initiatives at University of Wollongong. In her study of underage drinking, funded by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education and done in partnership with NSW police, she found parents were willing to buy alcohol for children as young as 14 even though they knew it was illegal.

''Allowing children to drink in the home is also increasing, and is more common among higher-educated, high-income people,'' Professor Jones says.

''There's a really strong perception that it teaches them to drink responsibly but evidence doesn't support that.''

What studies do show is alcohol harms the teenage brain, which doesn't stop developing until the early 20s. The earlier people start drinking, the more standard drinks they are likely to down in a session as they get older, Professor Jones says.

The measures professors Daube and Jones are calling for are comprehensive. Warning labels on alcohol, controls on alcohol promotion, a reform of alcohol taxation, mandatory pub and club closing hours and minimum pricing of alcohol sold in liquor stores.

In Europe, such measures would seem draconian. If binge-drinking culture seems less problematic in a place where alcohol can be bought for a few euros everywhere from supermarkets to McDonald's, why should Australia raise the price of liquor and close pubs by 3am?

''We hear a lot of talk about European drinking culture,'' Professor Daube says.

''But youth culture is much less differentiated between countries than it used to be.''

A new phrase has entered the vernacular of French youth - ''le binge''.

''There is a real myth that if we drank like the Europeans, everything would be perfect,'' Professor Daube says.

''Well, the Europeans are suffering much worse from long-term effects of drinking like liver cirrhosis, so I wouldn't be supporting that myth.''

Professor Daube says the Australian government is still at the whim of the alcohol industry; powerful, influential, well-connected and with historical links to tobacco.

He is not confident the government will stand up to it off their own backs, but believes a groundswell of concern about the harms of alcohol, which is developing in the community, will mean they soon have to. ''Parents are worrying enormously,'' he says.

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