UK binge drinking 'at crisis levels'

Download

The girls slumped in wheelchairs look barely conscious, their blond heads lolling above the plastic vomit bags tied like bibs around their necks.

It's an hour to midnight on Friday, and the two girls, who look no older than 18, are being wheeled from an ambulance to a clinic set up discreetly in a dark alley in London's Soho entertainment district.

They're the first of many to be picked up on this night by the ambulance, known as a "booze bus", and carried to the clinic, both government services dedicated to keeping drunk people out of trouble and out of emergency rooms.

Binge drinking has reached crisis levels in Britain, health experts say, costing the cash-strapped National Health Service 2.7 billion pounds (US$4.4 billion) a year, including the cost of hospital admissions related to booze-fueled violence and longer-term health problems. Unlike all other major health threats, liver disease is on the rise in Britain, increasing by 25 percent in the last decade and causing a record level of deaths, according to recent government figures.

Doctors believe rising obesity is combining with heavy drinking to fuel the spike in liver disease, which is hitting more young people than ever.

"Undoubtedly professionals are seeing more (patients) in their late-20s to mid-30s, which would have been unusual 20 years ago," said Chris Day, a liver disease specialist at Newcastle University.

The headline-grabbing figures about ever-younger liver disease victims may seem to suggest that Britain has quite recently turned into a nation of raging alcoholics. But it's not news that the British like their tipple. This is, after all, a nation known around the world for its ales and its pubs, the default venue for any British social gathering from a quiet date to after-work networking.

Despite that, most experts agree that Britons, on the whole, don't drink more than other Europeans. In fact, overall alcohol consumption levels here have come down since the mid-2000s.

But that's the average. The problem seems to lie with a minority of hard-core drinkers who tend to down a huge amount in a short time.

"The key point is the ways in which we behave when we're drinking - it involves very public displays of reckless drunkenness," said Jamie Bartlett, a researcher at the London-based think tank Demos who has written about alcohol abuse.

"It's not an issue of consumption. It's an issue of behavior."

The legal drinking age in Britain is 18, compared to 21 in the US, but many drinkers start younger. Social workers say lax control of retail sales and cheap alcohol, commonly available for less than 70 pence ($1.10) a can in supermarkets, makes it easy for young people to experiment with liquor.

About the broadcaster:

Emily Cheng is an editor at China Daily. She was born in Sydney, Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in Media, English Literature and Politics. She has worked in the media industry since starting university and this is the third time she has settled abroad - she interned with a magazine in Hong Kong 2007 and studied at the University of Leeds in 2009.