“is teaching teenagers to drink the ‘right thing to do’? ”

Arguable.

“is teaching teenagers how to drink the ‘right thing to do’?”

Yes.

Alcohol is part of adult life and the proper preparation of the young for said adult life will include alcohol along with all the other things that adult life will bring, like sex, work and taxes.

To some degree this is an irresponsible article as it appears to just accept teenagers drinking to excess. A form of abdication of adult responsibility to some extent.

Alcohol abuse education is pointless as it just becomes another challenge or ‘badge to collect’. A sort of street-cred if you like.

It requires qualified and skilled practitioners to impart an understanding of the carcinogenic (cancer causing properties in alcohol to start with followed by the financial and social impact related to drinking alcohol in relatively small quantities.

These points are best taught by shock tactics in my opinion, an arranged visit to a city morgue on a Monday morning will leave an alcoholic stench in one’s senses that acts as a sharp lesson of the worst outcome of excessive drinking.

As for the financial and social impact of alcohol, there is no such thing as a well- fed and well-clothed working class home where excess alcohol is prevalent. Domestic violance is also prominently linked where excess alcohol is present.

As for relating alcohol and sex education, barmy. We now know for absolute certainty that sex education has been enormously successful over the last 40 years. The more education they’ve received, the more sex they’ve been having and the more abortions are consistently taking place ! !

I think it’s worth re-posting the comment on the other site, as it expresses my own view better than I could myself.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the alcohol industry lobby has written this. What would be the reaction if a similar argument were contrived for sensible use of ecstasy for example? Given that alcohol is the most misused drug in the UK and causes more harm than all controlled drugs, wouldn’t it be more sensible to wean children on to alternative drugs? I doubt if I would support this position either as young persons do not share the same rights to inebriants that adults should, but it cannot be argued that to normalise the use of the most harmful drug in isolation is a good idea.

My opinion of the JRF has just gone through the floor.

[2] Ted, are you sure you want to stand by the first three words of your comment?

@ Mike K ……you’re probably right but I think the article is well intentioned none the less.

I took my ids to the cinema we came out Friday to find a riot at 9.30 Friday night.

A number of girls had undressed and offered people to come and check out her they are real or false, before spewing up on their knee’s. two of us had to go over turn her on her side as she was choking on her vomit, she looked around to tell her my boobs are real passing out. The ambulance turned up and said she is OK take her home, both of us said we do not know who she is.

Twenty minutes later a full blown fight erupts and young men what to take a look if her boobs are real, another girl is now undressing before she goes down, me and the other lad say sod this and leave.

The pub is offering as much as you can drink for a tenner, one off nope it’s not every Friday and every week end.

I welcome any efforts to understand and try to deal with alcohol-related social and health issues. Given that alcohol use and abuse can start when people are in their teens then research-based approaches must be a good idea. However the research cited is limited, I’d like to try to understand whether we have a different drinking culture from other countries, if so what differences there are and whether they have similar problems.

Health professionals and police tell us that we have a problem in this country. I tend to be of the opinion that police see offending everywhere just as doctors see disease: It’s part of their jobs. They still shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

The problem is governments are barking up the wrong tree if they can stop teenagers getting drunk by taxing booze more.

With alcohol misuse now one of the most serious health concerns internationally there can be no justification for ignoring the problem. Up until now alcohol education has been largely ignored in favour of trhe more trendy option of ‘drug education’.

The consequences are visible on our streets late at night, where young people can be regularly seen binge drinking. If we are not to lose an entire generation we must address the problem and help them learn ‘how to drink’.

There is a biting Chinese proverb which says:
First the man takes a drink
Then the drink take the drink
Then the drink takes the man

Unless we tackle the binge drinking era head on, with adequately funded alcohol education programmes, we will have failed our youth.

@ 6. Cherub …..health professionals, government etc.. can do little on this subject. It is a matter of personal behaviour as taught to us by adults when we are young. When we mature we like to continue with similar attitudes as it’s ‘tradition’ or so we like to call it. Result, we and end up passing on those same negative behaviours to the next generation.

I was always allowed to drink at home from a young age, thus I never felt the need to go over the top when I was with my friends. I have pretty liberal parents and they never really minded if I came home drunk.
I think that’s the best way to be; it’s a more European outlook.

@9 Ted

That’s one theory, I’d like to see some real research to see whether it’s true. As I said, international comparators could be useful too.

I would cautiously agree with Tacitus. Sometimes professionals do get it wrong, but with alcohol the health concerns have been widely expressed for a long time. If this is the case it’s a bigger issue than parenting alone can solve.

5
I totally agree wtih your last paragraph, the leisure industry is too lucrative to have any real interest in promoting safe drinking, The Friday and Saturday night binges taking place in most towns and cities probably accounts for the majority of the trade for licensed premises located in town centres.
And supermarkets are still promoting cheap booze as loss-leaders, the money spent on advertising and education to promote safe drinking is chicken-feed compared to the tax revenue on alcohol sales.
And the current shower, that is now the government, will continue to serve the interests of the few against the safety of the many. Don’t hold your breath waiting for any serious response to tackle the problem.

“With alcohol misuse now one of the most serious health concerns internationally ”

I think I’d like to see proof of that actually.

We all know the 28/14 units a week thing was just a number plucked from the air. Some of us will also be aware that there are health effects to not drinking at all as well: teetotallers have higher rude death rate than do moderate drinkers. In fact, to get back up to the crude death rate of teetotallers you’ve got to be downing 50-60 units a week.

So I think I’d like to see some real (as opposed to “look at all the young people getting pissed on a weekend”) evidence of this serious international problem.

After all, there’s never been anyshortage of people telling us not to drink for moral reasons, have there? Wouldn’t want them to be able to sneak something in under the guise of “health” would we?

OP: “And there isn’t one teenage drinking culture: what young people drink, how much they drink, where they drink and how drunk they intend to get, differs between friendship groups.”

That gets close to an analysis of the concern.

Under 18 year olds can’t use pubs to drink. Their drinking practice is defined by opportunity: street drinking or parents turning a blind eye at teen stop overs and parties.

When teens reach the age of 18, they will use the pub. Booze will cost two or three times as much as the local off-licence. And there are social rules about how you might conduct yourself after one too many. But, for most, it is better to drink in the pub than in a bus shelter with under age mates.

I understand that teens drinking on the street cause disorder. Address it as a disorder problem; do not dramatise events or demand new laws.

Nobody is saying that teenagers drinking is a great thing, and nobody is saying that kids being wrecked is fun and acceptable. But they WILL drink anyway, which means we have to find the best way to deal with it. There’s no harm in starting to drink at 16 or 17 if you’re sensible. Last week, my friends and I had to look after a drunk 15 year old who was almost passed out and being molested by a lad she was with. She threw up on herself and they took pictures of it then abandoned her.

No amount of hectoring kids is going to convince them not to drink, but we can tell them things like “don’t mix your drinks” and “if you’re a girl, make sure the group you’re drinking in has girls in it, and there’s someone there who will look after you.” For all of the nonsense said about teenagers these days, most of them are still quite naive. If we don’t tell them these things, we’re letting them down.

And as for the nonsensical point of view that sex education encourages kids to have sex, this kind of comment is better suited to the Daily Mail website. Teenagers have always had sex. The fact that abortions are going up is because pregnant women are less hesitant to have abortions, and this is a good thing. Anyone who thinks you can stop teenagers having sex or drinking or taking ecstasy by moralising at them is an idiot. This is half the point of being a teenager. All you can do is give them the truth about what the risks are and how to minimise them.

@ 2 Ted

“To some degree this is an irresponsible article as it appears to just accept teenagers drinking to excess. A form of abdication of adult responsibility to some extent.”

Admitting that a problem cannot be perfectly solved is not abrogation of responsibility. The OP is simply trying to take a pragmatic approach to fixing this problem – how is that irresponsible?

“Alcohol abuse education is pointless as it just becomes another challenge or ‘badge to collect’. A sort of street-cred if you like.”

I sometimes got so drunk I was sick as a teenager, but I don’t remember enjoying it or being proud of it. As such, could you provide some figures to back up your statement? Otherwise it just sounds like mass stereotyping.

What would be the reaction if a similar argument were contrived for sensible use of ecstasy for example?

100% approval from anyone sensible; enraged wibbling from puritan morons.

I’d like to try to understand whether we have a different drinking culture from other countries, if so what differences there are and whether they have similar problems.

Yes, because that would be a sensible thing involving research and evidence-based policymaking, not just the usual suspects expressing blanket disapproval of anything that might be considered enjoyable.

with alcohol the health concerns have been widely expressed for a long time

There are some separate points being conflated here:
1) is the long-term consumption of very large amounts of alcohol (more than about 50 units per week) associated with poorer health outcomes than the long-term consumption of moderate amounts of alcohol? Answer: yes.

2) is the consumption of very large amounts of alcohol in one night associated with a risk of alcohol poisoning and liver damage? Answer: yes.

3) are there any significant health consequences from people (whether they’re 16 or 40) having a few drinks on a Saturday night, as long as they don’t drink enough to get alcohol poisoning? Answer: no.

Interesting debates and comments in response to the blog.

Of course, teaching harm reduction approaches is just one way of tackling excessive alcohol consumption amongst young people. See http://www.jrf.org.uk for our research into the range of influences on young people’s drinking and what else might help to change some of the negative aspects of young people’s drinking cultures. Some interesting stuff on parental influence.

Whilst most young people learn to moderate their consumption as they get older, this learning is gained through trial and error, in the company of other young people trying to get drunk and not caught and without any real adult input. The strategies used by teenagers to control their drinking are often relatively simplistic and prone to failure. On this basis, there seems to be merit in considering teaching young drinkers better strategies to control their alcohol consumption as part of a range of initiatives designed to reduce alcohol related harm.