Student leaders have called on the Scottish government to clamp down on booze binge tours.
The Coalition Against Raising the Drinking Age in Scotland (Cardas) says universities have been swamped by event organisers promoting alcoholic binge tours for students across Scotland.
The coalition - which includes Scotland's National Union of Students, the Scottish Youth Parliament and most students' unions - has demanded action after a host of binge-tour promoters swooped on campuses at the start of term.
Carnage UK is promoting a "dirty porn star" themed fancy dress pub crawl in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling aimed at students next month.
The company operates events across the UK under the slogan "it's going to get messy" and has drawn criticism from students' unions, alcohol retailers and the police in cities in England for sending out the wrong message about excessive alcohol consumption.
Cardas wants the Scottish government and alcohol retailers to do more to stop groups such as Carnage UK running events that it believes "are clearly and worryingly focused entirely on the excessive consumption of alcohol", "encourage risky behaviour" and "undermine the responsible drinking message that students' unions are promoting".
Tom French, Cardas coordinator, said: "Binge-tour promoters like Carnage have been banned from students' unions across Scotland, but the student community alone cannot prevent the tide of promotional materials that is hitting university campuses day-in, day-out.
"Rather than wasting time fiddling about with the minimum purchase age for alcohol, the Scottish government should be clamping down on these irresponsible organisations whose sole purpose appears to be actively promoting binge drinking."
French added: "Even if you offer soft drinks, they must be fully aware that a disproportionate number will be binge drinking and that has immediate health effects.
"Who goes on a pub crawl to have an orange juice? Unless the people on it are very excitable on their soft drinks – the videos and photos suggest they're not drinking responsibly.
"Regardless of the drinking aspect, it's fairly degrading especially to young girls to influence them to dress down and do some of the things they are doing in the videos."
He added that students' unions were actively damaging their finances by not promoting irresponsible drinking.
Carnage UK rejected the claims in a robust statement, and accused student unions of irresponsible behaviour.
George Thomas, representing Edinburgh University students' association, said: "Over the past few year, an increasing number of binge tours have been targeted at our students.
"We've banned organisations like Carnage UK and Student Night Out from using our students' union buildings to promote these tasteless events, but they keep on coming back and finding new ways to sell their booze fests to our students - with worrying results.
"We've seen students on these tours getting dangerously drunk. [They are] putting young people in risky situations with the potential to cause serious health problems. Something needs to be done now to call time on these irresponsible binge tours."
