• 12/8/2004
  • Australia
  • Amanda Hodge
  • The Australian (www.theaustralian.news.com)

IT’S 7pm, the Christmas carols at the office party are on a loop and you have four hours to drink the boss broke at the complimentary bar.

In a country where alcohol is so intrinsic to celebrations that jolly is a euphemism for drunk, Christmas is the season for sanctioned binge drinking. During the next month, millions of litres of beer, wine and bubbles will be consumed in an orgy of hedonism. And in Australia this indulgence isn’t limited to the festive season. It’s a year-round event.

Binge drinking is one of our most intractable and expensive health issues, costing $7.6 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism, injuries, death and disease. On any weekend, 75 per cent of the patients in emergency wards will have alcohol-related complaints.

A 2003 survey by the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction found most alcohol-related harm comes not from alcohol-dependant people but from low to moderate consumers who binge.

“Eighty per cent of alcohol consumed in Australia is consumed at risky levels,” says emeritus professor and chairman of the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation Ian Webster. “That’s accepted as normal and it ought not to be.”

Drinking patterns among younger Australians is of particular concern, especially given recent reports of binge drinking by children as young as 12. Recent surveys found that among 14 to 17-year-olds, 64 per cent of boys and 69 per cent of girls were drinkers. Between one-quarter to one-third of 14 to 25-year-olds drink in a high-risk manner and as many as 6500 Australian teenagers drink on a daily basis. The problem has become such a regularly discussed and researched topic that statistics can even narrow down how many drinks the average young man at a sporting club will consume before he gets in his car — 10.

Webster says concern about young binge drinkers should not obscure the alcohol issues that exist among older Australians. He says it is often the wealthier, older professionals in the community who will experience serious biological damage in later life from continuous bingeing and harmful drinking. That is because in Australia, the higher the income, the more in percentage and absolute terms is spent on alcohol.

Professions such as law, medicine, the armed forces and media have cultures where drinking is not only accepted but also expected. Young women with more money and independence are also drinking greater volumes at a younger age. While men are more likely to drink at harmful levels, women are catching up.

Doctors are already starting to see chronic conditions from excessive alcohol consumption in women as young as 40 — thin, pale skin, high blood pressure, vulnerability to bone fractures, osteoporosis and breast cancer. For an industry that spends millions each year promoting its product as glamorous, the results of harmful drinking are far from seductive.

The National Health and Medical Research Foundation suggests men should not drink more than 28 drinks in a week and women no more than 14. Yet that exceeds the World Health Organisation guidelines, which put safe drinking levels at four drinks a day for men and two for women, with two alcohol free days every week.

Between 1980 and 2004, Australia’s alcohol consumption dropped 25 per cent. In the same period, deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and head and neck cancer — often related to alcohol misuse — dropped by about the same amount.

People may be drinking less today but binge drinking is on the rise and that is what medical experts and alcohol counsellors agree is filling the emergency wards with young drinkers, and the cancer and heart disease wards with older Australians.

Dillon says binge drinking is so culturally embedded in Australia that anyone speaking out against it risks being branded a wowser. But the beginnings of a backlash is emerging. The recent NSW alcohol summit spurred vigorous debate on various proposals, including one to ban drinking on footpaths outside pubs.

Wodak says government intervention is the key to breaking entrenched alcohol abuse, by imposing stricter guidelines for alcohol marketing, resisting attempts to make alcohol more accessible and reviewing the way it’s taxed.