GUILLERMO NAVARRO / COVER FOR TIME STAGGERING STATISTICS Young people drink out-side, botellón style, in Madrid; their generation began drinking almost four years earlier than that of their parents

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Posted Sunday, December 11, 2005; 12.20GMT
That gloomy parade didn't trouble the teens around the Continent recently quizzed by Time about their drinking habits. "I see nothing wrong with drinking," says Monika, 15, sitting at the Bolek bar, in Warsaw's Pola Mokotowskie park. "How can you go to a disco and not drink? Or sit and talk with your friends and what, drink Coke? Everyone would think you are a loser or a weirdo." "It's fun and it's cheap," says Alek Stepien, 17, after buying a bottle of vodka in central Warsaw. "This costs the same as going to the movies, and it's fun for the whole night." Pieri, 14, goes to the Campo dei Fiori in central Rome to knock back a few with the crowds there. "They see others doing it, and they do it too," he says.

While Italy has cut its overall consumption of alcohol in half in the past 25 years, its young people are moving in the other direction. Italians have the lowest start-drinking age in Europe: 12.2 years compared to a European average of 14.6. The number of booze-quaffing Italian boys aged 14 to 17 rose 31% between 1995 and 2000; the number of girls more than doubled. There's no minimum age to buy liquor in stores, and 16 is the age for getting served in bars, where a popular drink for novices is a shot of rum followed by pear juice — half the price of an "alcopop," one of the sugary spirit-based drinks targeted at kids. Asked whether they've ever been requested to show ID when out drinking, a group of Roman teenagers erupts in laughter. "Nobody has ever asked me for anything," says Maria Teresa, 15.

Experts say lots of trends are converging to make boozing a bigger part of youth culture. "Puberty and menarche occur ever earlier," says Jürgen Schlieckau, head of pedagogical services at the Dietrich-Bonhoeffer Clinic in Ahlhorn, Germany, which has 48 beds for treating kids with addiction problems. "And so does the difficult search for identity and autonomy that goes with them." Teens want to emulate adults and rebel at the same time. "They have problems communicating," says Dr. Emanuele Scafato, director of the Observatory on Alcohol at Italy's National Institute of Health. "When asked why they drink, they say things like, 'I feel much safer and stronger.'" Anita Gryzicka, a 16-year-old sipping beer with her friends at the Bolek bar, agrees: "I like to drink with my girlfriends. We talk about boys, sex, parents. It's so much easier to talk when you are a bit drunk."

Teenagers have more independence than they used to, more money, and are becoming part of a pan-European lifestyle market that big companies covet. "It used to be that if you were in Italy and grew up in a family that drank wine, you would drink wine, too," says Dr. Peter Anderson, a public-health specialist who has prepared a report on alcohol policy for the European Commission. "Now you're exposed to ads for beer and spirits by companies that know how to devise products young people like, at prices they can afford." A TV ad in Italy shows how booze companies entice the young. Motorcycle champion Valentino Rossi holds a helmet full of bottles while a gorgeous woman looks on, gazing fetchingly.

But girls aren't just watching the boys; they've started to match them round for round. "Before the differences between boys and girls were so much greater," says Giulia, a 15-year-old Roman. "Now we feel equal." In Poland last year, there were actually more 15-year-old girls who drank (54%) than boys (46%). "A few years ago it was hard to remember orders from girls," says Jurek, a bartender at Bolek. "One juice, one Coke, one soda, one beer. Now it's easy: beer, beer, beer." Jerzy Mellibruda, a Warsaw professor who used to head the government's agency for prevention of alcohol problems, says liquor advertising — prohibited under communism but now omnipresent — has "made drinking cool. When I ask my female students why they binge, they tell me it's fun. They see nothing wrong with it."

In Britain they have a term for hard-swigging females: ladettes. British pub culture used to revolve around a strong social network in which regulars enforced unspoken rules about proper behavior among newer drinkers. Now the trend is toward what Plant calls "vertical drinking palaces" (standing-room-only bars) patronized only by young people, located in special "nighttime-industry" districts. Social inhibitions wither under these conditions. One result is a willingness to drink more. A survey of patrons entering bars in Manchester in 2004 found they already rated themselves an average of 1.8 on a five-point scale of intoxication. Women had drunk the equivalent of about one bottle of wine and the men had drunk nearly two, meeting the research definition of "binge drinkers" before they even got to the bar — where they were planning to get to 3.8 on the intoxication scale. Natalie, an 18-year-old lacing up her silver sandals in the ladies room at the Black Sheep Bar, a pub in the London suburb of East Croydon whose main stretch has some 19 bars and clubs, is matter-of-fact about the buzz she's after. Binge drinking "is what we do," she says. "We don't need to get drunk. We just do it because we can."

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