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Binge Drinking in the UK

Binge-drinking is a term that seems omnipresent in the media in recent times. Scan through a newspaper and it is impossible to avoid running into an article with the words binge, drink and crisis littered throughout. Flick through the television channels at night and there is a fair chance you will stumble across some freakish documentary filmed from the roof of a police van featuring inebriated revellers vomiting in shop doorways and pursuing each other with lead piping and smashed bottles. This newfangled media obsession with binge-drinking has yielded numerous statistics. According to The Daily Mail almost a quarter of British adults are binge-drinkers with 18-24 year old males topping the league. It seems that children too are acquiring a penchant for liquor with research suggesting that the numbers of cider-chugging-cherubs have doubled in the past five years.

With all these shock-stats brandished across our morning reading material and then visualised on an evening news piece or Booze Britain, it may be worthwhile for us to consider the following: What actually constitutes binge-drinking?

In Russia they have a term, Zapoy, which is roughly Russian parlance for binge-drinking. However, the implications of Zapoy to the average Russian are two or three days of sustained drunkenness which is vastly different to our own understanding of binging. Shunt away the image of the red-eyed, vodka-drenched Dostoevskyian character in the Cossack hat stumbling through the streets of St Petersburg into the path of an oncoming carriage and ponder your own definition of binge-drinking for a moment. What do we consider it to represent? The tottering partakers of singing and hi-jinks in any city centre on a weekend night or the jovial herd of football supporters cheering their team to victory during the intermission of a Saturday beerfest?

In its simplest form, binge-drinking is the act of drinking purely to get drunk. The period of drunkenness should correlate with a much longer period of sobriety which is where the binge drinker separates himself from the alcoholic, although that is not to say that there is no connection between the two. Epidemiologists have carved and refined the term enabling them to apply it with more precision. They tend to refer to a five drink threshold (four for women) or a fifty percent plus consumption of the maximum weekly recommended allowance in one evening (around 21 units is the suggested weekly zenith for men which equates to about ten average strength beers or eight small glasses of wine). To conjure an example from these guidelines; a woman enjoying three glasses of wine during lunch with a friend could be said to be binge-drinking as would a man supping four pints of ale on a Sunday afternoon in a country pub.

It is a long road from the vodka-addled Russian on a three-day zapoy bender to the woman having a few wines with her poulet des landes at The Savoy and we must stumble passed the city-centre revellers and football drinking crowd along the way. If the government is to succeed in attaching a health message or a stigma to binge-drinking, then it is important that they confine its usage to those most at risk.