Alcohol use is a rite of passage in America that generally happens before that magical age of 21.  However, there is an increasing trend in alcohol abuse among young women that is quite distressing.

Some dangerous numbers from Medicine Net:

About half of junior high and senior high school students drink alcohol on a monthly basis, and 14% of teens have been intoxicated at least once in the past year. Nearly 8% of teens who drink say they drink at least five or more alcoholic drinks in a row (binge drink).

Those are some truly frightening numbers.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this (as the mother of an adolescent and as a secondary school teacher, I guess it would be hard not to), and a part of my me wants to say, “Yeah, when I was in high school, everybody drank.  It’s not like it’s a new phenomenon.”  The absolute truth is, I didn’t drink when I was in high school (exposure to alcoholism gave me a moral base for this … of course, college was a different story); however, I was sort of the master designated driver, so I saw various friends in some pretty ridiculous states.  However, what I am sticking on is the 5+ drinks in a row, which I don’t think was the norm back in the ’90s–binge drinking is by all accounts on the increase, and this is something to be very concerned about.

From NewScientist:

Post-mortems of binge-drinking adolescent monkeys have produced the best evidence yet that heavy drinking at an early age can do lasting damage to the brain.

The worst damage was to stem cells destined to become neurons in the hippocampus, the brain area responsible for memory and spatial awareness.

Monkey and human brains develop in the same way, so the finding suggests that similar effects may occur in human teenagers. It thus reinforces the rationale for anti-alcohol policies in the US and elsewhere which aim to raise the age at with people start to drink.

Perhaps most frightening is the increase in alcohol abuse by adolescent girls. 
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Malvern St. James school, located in the county of Worcestershire in Central UK, is either a progressively-thinking school or teenage binge drinking really is utterly out of control.

The all-girl school recently just formulated a wine-tasting club — and one can  join at age sixteen.   The club’s creator also has some plans in the works for the girls to visit a nearby boys school for a dinner party in conjunction with their wine-tasting.  The club’s creator, Rachel Huntley, is a wino critical thinker herself and teaches the subject at school.

Huntly states that by creating a club that’s designed to appreciate the fine art that is wine-tasting, girls will be less likely to engage in binge drinking in a society that promotes “get as wasted as you can, as fast as you can.”  Huntly also hopes that the wine-tasting club will refine the girls a bit and remand sophistication thereafter.  Huntly states:

“As an all-girls’ school, we have recognised that our children are under enormous pressure to conform to a drinking culture which has huge adverse health and social effects… a refined social event makes binge drinking alcohol seem like the “poorer sister” to the “interesting and diverse cultural world of wine”.

The girls were encouraged to take the class along with their traditional Home Ec/Cooking course and wine presentations were accompanied by different foods of the region, each complementing the wine’s taste.

To be honest with you, I kind of don’t have a problem with this.  I, a dedicated wine-drinker (read: I drink no other forms of alcohol generally), find that yes, there is a certain sophistication in wine connoisseurship.  Not to mention, Europe has a marginally different view of young adults and the consumption of alcohol.  I remember growing up with an Italian best friend — her cousins from Sicily and Favara would come to visit practically every summer.  My friend and I would drool at the dinner table watching them knock back a glass of wine or taste some Balvenie scotch on the rocks.  Yet, in that particular European culture it was acceptable and maybe rightfully so.  To take the stigma and danger of repercussions out of something kind of takes the wind out of young rebels’ sails.

Is that the way it is or is the UK slowly-but-surely turning their children into alcoholics?  The former is an extreme statement to make and frankly, I don’t buy it.   What do you guys think?  Is a wine-tasting club at a high school a bad idea?

A BBC article reports that 15% of UK women binge drink each week, a figure that has nearly doubled from the 7% documented in the 1990s. In contrast, weekly binge drinking among men was only up a percentage point from the 1990s, from 22% to 23%. The study cited in the article also found that non-binge drinking was also up among UK men and women.

In case you’re wondering what this study considers “binge drinking,” you’re out of luck. Bizarrely, the article doesn’t specify, so as I sit here nursing my Brooklyn Lager, I’m left to wonder whether I’m part of the problem.  Just as a reference point, according to the “Binge Drinking” Wikipedia article (pulling out the big guns here, I know):

There is currently no international consensus on how many drinks constitute a “binge,” but the term is often taken to mean consuming 5 or more standard drinks (male), or 4 or more drinks (female), in about two hours for a typical adult.

Alright, so two drinks per hour over two hours. I’ve done that yesterday before. But what’s a “standard drink”? A beer? A stiff martini? A highball with rail alcohol? Nobody seems to know. Sounds to me kind of like the wishy-washy reasoning used by the Supreme Court to determine what constitutes pornography: “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Researchers in the study theorized that increased binge drinking in women “was likely to be linked to greater financial security and the influence of advertising.” I haven’t seen a copy of the study, but those explanations seem hokey and baseless.  Researchers conduct entire studies attempting to link upticks in binge drinking with any number of factors, and it is irresponsible of scientists to project that vague concepts such as “financial security” and “the influence of advertising” (without even specifying what sort of advertising) are to blame.  In fact, given this economy, blaming increased “financial security” as a reason people are pounding drinks is pretty laughable.

Whenever I see reports that include “bad news” statistics about how everyone is drinking more, doing more drugs, having sex younger, etc  and then blaming it on somewhat ridiculous targets, it reminds me of medical knowledge in the middle ages. Bubonic Plague was blamed on, among other things, Jews, well poisoning and God’s wrath. Replace “well poisoning” with  video games, celebrity culture and movies and you have modern day sociology studies. Times have changed, but the absurd reasoning and lack of evidence remains the same.

Binge drinking can be a serious problem, but it helps no one to publish stark statistics produced by nebulous studies.  You simply can’t publish articles about the downfall of modern society if the science behind it is bunk. So until someone can tell me exactly what binge drinking entails, how it will negatively affect my life and what’s causing me to do it, I will continue drinking my 3pm Brooklyn Lager as I pen pieces of Zelda Lily. You can’t stop me.