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Main Content
Drinking Games are Child’s Play
Benders, power hours, shots, chugging contests - more and more European teenagers don't know when to put down their drink and call it a night
Alcohol has long been associated with special occasions – dinner parties, celebratory toasts, New Year’s Eve flutes of champagne. Its traditional role as something festive is embedded in cultures throughout the world, with Europe certainly not one to be the exception. Yet the role of alcohol throughout the continent has been changing and in many instances, not for the better. Rather than a glass of wine with a meal, an increasing number of Europeans are reaching for five or more drinks in one sitting and what is even more worrisome is that they are doing so at a younger age.
Binge drinking, or the consumption of more than 60 grams of alcohol for men and 40 grams for women in secession, has been a plague on American university campuses for decades as students over-indulged in their first years living away from home. The trend has grown, however, and though it is still less common in southern Europe, in northern Europe, the UK, Ireland, Slovenia and Latvia there has been a significant spike since the 1990s. At present the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Europe Region is considered to be the heaviest drinking region in the world. The average 9.24 litres of alcohol consumed a year per person are instrumental to Europe’s lead in the percentage of alcohol-related deaths. Young people alone, those between 15 and 29, account for 55,000 deaths annually due to road accidents, poisonings, suicide and murders linked to alcohol.
Teenagers are most likely to engage in binge drinking, with some starting as young as 12. The revelation has provoked policymakers to discuss the possibility of increasing the minimum age for purchasing and consuming alcohol. At present, it is 18 in most EU countries, with the exceptions of Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Germany, where it is only 16. The suggestion is not universally accepted, however, particularly since the higher drinking age in the United States has not halted the tendency to drink too much. Several studies even suggest that abstinence from alcohol in the family home contributes to young people not realising what their limits are or what is acceptable behaviour when drinking.
Authorities from the WHO to the European Union institutions have all come up with their own theories and resolutions, but despite the variations, they all seem to come to a consensus that the role of advertising and pop culture cannot be underestimated. While the continent was once divided into the beer, wine and vodka belts, the lines between the beverages of choice are increasingly blurred as branding and the image associated with each drink becomes more important. Targeting youth, creating ‘designer’ cocktails and using celebrity endorsements all contribute to developing a belief system that alcohol has a transformative power that will make the drinker more popular, attractive or successful. Perceived as something that is an escape from the common day-to-day, the consumption of alcohol comes to hold an allure for impressionable young minds.
Advertisers and pop culture icons are sending a clear message to youngsters – it is okay to wake up still intoxicated from a night out with only a vague recollection of what happened. Infiltration of social media networks as part of their commercial outreach further worsens the problem by propagating the image that ‘everyone else is doing it’. In posting pro-alcohol messages on a medium that young people are widely present on, such as Facebook or Twitter, companies and users alike are ignoring any moral responsibility.
“There’s a real danger of children and young people being exposed to alcohol marketing on such sites, particularly given that age verification mechanisms are largely ineffective. This is especially worrying given that research shows that alcohol advertising and marketing have a significant impact on young people’s decision about alcohol”, said Chief Executive of Alcohol Concern, Don Shenker.
To help avoid such associations and discourage companies from marketing their alcoholic drinks at youth, the European Council issued Recommendation 2001/458/EC in June 2001. It called for restraint from using styles that are associated with pop culture and any implications that the beverage will help achieve more acceptance or better performance socially and professionally. Ten years later, the national regulations are still widely different across borders in the European Union, though they all seem to share a certain fuzziness that makes it difficult to assess whether a specific commercial or endorsement is acceptable or not.
Advertising and liquor companies cannot, however, be held accountable for all of the damage done by binge drinking. With singers like Ke$ha singing about being “pretty and plastered” or LMFAO dedicating an entire chorus to one word – shots – the lifestyle choices of celebrities certainly add to the normalisation of alcohol consumption. Starlets like Lindsay Lohan donning monitoring bracelets and films such as the Hangover make blacking out from a combination of drugs and alcohol seem like a joke. Football teams receiving sponsorship from beer companies, like Carlsberg’s prominent role in the Euro 2008, further fuel false assumptions by creating the impression that an athlete will celebrate a victorious match or mourn a loss with a few pints. Though to an adult viewer such allusions may go unnoticed, children and teenagers are more likely to pick up on them and subsequently hop on a high-speed train to getting drunk.
While it is impossible for youth to live their lives oblivious to alcohol, it is certainly possible for them to be equally aware of the dangers associated with drinking too much. Yet to successfully raise awareness, advertisers, alcohol companies, governments and parents must work together to ensure that young people do not demonise alcohol and instead realise when enough is enough.