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Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Binge drinking in Australia.
There was a good article in the West Australian newspaper today (May 14th) by Tony Rutherford. He was discussing lifestyle campaigns. He states, “No day passes without there being either a new health scare or a new measure announced to improve our health or make our lifestyle healthier”. Then he goes on to mention the threat to health now reported about the binge drinking of young women in Australia. Many are asking why has the binge drinking in this group increased?
Why do they do it?
Recently released papers by the Australian Psychological Society (APS) on substance use and the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey repeatedly mention terms such as “High risk drinking” and “Binge drinking”.
I have surveyed these documents in order to find out actually what is high risk drinking and binge drinking. The first thing I discovered was that this is no easy task. To find the definitions of such terms is difficult. I surveyed these documents and could not find a definition for these terms. I even contacted one of the authors of the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey to ask him. He referred me back to a particular place on the website where I could find it. So I went back and had another look and I could still not find it!!
Of course after this frustrating exercise one begins to wonder why they are so hard to find? Why aren’t the definitions clearly and openly displayed for all to see? It does make one wonder about such things. Do they have something to hide?
However I have persevered and I have actually found some information on what these terms actually mean.
For instance I found - “While these guidelines equivocate on the definition of binge drinking, they imply that binge drinking occurs at five drinks or more for men; three or more for women. This definition obtains in almost all subsequent Australian studies.“
So if a woman has three standard drinks in a night then she is binge drinking or drinking alcohol at a high risk level. So lets work out what that means.
In your average bottle of wine in Australia (750 ml) there are 8 standard drinks. So binge drinking is 3/8 of a bottle of your usual wine. That amounts to 3 small glasses of wine in one session.
OK. So the 20 year old woman is going on a night out with her girl friends. The usual girls night out and she sets out to do the right thing with her drinking. She gets to the night spots at about 8pm and is due to be home by about 1am. A common scenario I think you would agree.
So at 8pm she gets a small glass of wine and drinks it in about 15 minutes. She then waits one and a half hours before she gets another one. She may even have a soft drink or water in between. She buys her second small glass of wine at 10pm and drinks it as well. Two hours later at midnight she buys her third small glass of wine. And then she goes home.
She is then informed by the government and the Australian health authorities and the Australian Medical Association that last night she went binge drinking and drank alcohol at a high risk level.
What is she going to think about all that? Just because the government and the health authorities tell us what unhealthy drinking is, does not mean that it is. They are treating the general public like they are stupid and that they just expect to be believed. People will not just accept such information. They will go out and make their own observations.
That young woman will think that the advice she was given about binge drinking is absurd and a nonsense, which indeed it is. Drinking at that rate she would hardly even feel the effects of the alcohol. She certainly would not have a hang over the next day. She will think, how can I go on a drinking binge on a big girls night out and have very little if any hangover the next day?
She will conclude that she is being lied to. She will conclude that the dangers of binge drinking are grossly exaggerated, as indeed they are. No wonder so many young women are now binge drinking. The health department has just redefined what it is, so it now includes more young women.
Can you believe the Lard Information Council?
Of course this has been going on for decades and I would suggest that the public mostly accept that health warnings are by and large exaggerated and thus they are dismissed by most people.
This quote comes from the Editorial of the “Medical Journal of Australia”, 2007, by A. Jorm and D. Lubman.
“Mass media campaigns in other areas of health have typically had very little
effect, including when drug misuse prevention has been the goal. In many cases,
the weak effect has been due to campaigns being insufficient in intensity.“
Perhaps the real reason why such mass media campaigns have little impact is because the public see that they are being treated like they are stupid and thus they will go out and make their own observations. And usually they will decide that the dangers are exaggerated as mostly they are.
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