There was bad news yesterday on two of the country's heaviest addictions: alcohol and cannabis. On the alcohol front, a new study of teenage girls showed that for the first time they had overtaken boys in levels of binge drinking. A survey of 2,000 British pupils found 29% of girls aged 15 and 16 years old admitting to at least one drinking binge within the previous month, compared to 25% of boys. Earlier studies showed women aged 16 to 24 had doubled their consumption of alcohol in a decade, but they were still below young men's levels, even though these were dropping. Now the next generation of young women is already exceeding males in consumption of alcohol, both in terms of instances of excess drinking and quantity drunk. If this was not bad enough, a report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found 15-year-old English boys were the heaviest users of cannabis in Europe. Some 10% admitted smoking the drug at least 40 times in the last year.
As the drug centre noted, although the short-term effects - memory loss or severe panic attacks - were restricted to a few, far too little was known about long-term chronic effects from regular use, not least because it was frequently associated with binge drinking and smoking. Binge drinking is far more dangerous than more modest but regular imbibing because more alcohol is absorbed. It causes more liver disease and upper gastrointestinal cancers than drinking the equivalent amount of alcohol over a longer time period. The recent public-health white paper estimated that 6 million people in England were drinking above the government's recommended levels - two medium-sized glasses of wine a day for men, less for women - with up to 22,000 people a year dying from excess drinking.
The reduction of alcohol abuse was the weakest part of the white paper, yet Western Australia has demonstrated that a robust and well-focused strategy in schools can succeed. Its school harm reduction programme has been rigorously evaluated and found to have cut consumption by up to one third. Alcohol did not even feature in the prime minister's speech on drugs yesterday. There was the welcome promise of increasing treatment for problem drug abusers from 1,500 a month to 1,000 a week, but still too much emphasis on a cracking down on suppliers, rather than a serious drive in reducing demand. Too many chronic abusers are dropping out of existing treatment programmes or even failing to get there for the start. Yet the projects remain the best long-term hope.
