SPECIAL REPORT

Posted Sunday, December 11, 2005; 12.20GMT
Can anything be done to pour this genie back in its bottle? One problem is that the more people drink, the more they and those around them consider it normal. In Germany in 1998, for example, tour companies started to offer spring-break getaways to new high school graduates, featuring the chance to get pie-eyed in All You Can Drink evenings. The market mushroomed to 15,000 by 2002 and an estimated 40,000 this year.

It won't be easy or quick, but researchers are confident they know how to stem the teen drinking tide — if European governments would only stand up to alcohol companies and jibes about the "nanny state." The first step is to raise liquor taxes, according to the World Health Organization (who). When Poland removed its 25% tax on spirits in 2003 in advance of joining the E.U., consumption increased 25-28% in a year. When Germany imposed an average €0.83 tax on alcopops that nearly doubled their price, sales dropped 75%, without a noticeable move to substitute drinks. A who report concludes that "the robust finding is that if alcoholic beverage prices go up, consumption goes down. If prices go down, consumption goes up." According to public-health specialist Anderson's report, increasing liquor taxes in the E.U. 15 by 10% would prevent 9,000 deaths and raise billions of euros. Lowering the number and density of booze outlets, reducing pub hours, enforcing minimum-age laws, imposing tough ad restrictions and randomly breathalyzing drivers are all strategies proven to cut the propensity to drink.

But most of these policies would affect adults as well as teens — incurring a political cost and, say alcohol merchants, penalizing the vast majority who manage their drinking without incident. Their preferred answer, one shared by many governments, is education to promote "responsible drinking." But educational measures alone have a poor record of changing drinking behavior, says Anderson. "You need the law to back them up, the same way that enforcement was necessary to spread seat-belt use." The industry is also guilty of mixed messages: funding responsible drinking campaigns at the same time it pushes new low-sugar alcopop formulations to avoid tax.

Britain hopes to dilute binge culture with proposed powers to ban problem drinkers from whole zones of bars and pubs, by enforcing a drinking age of 18, and — more controversially — by extending drinking hours to mirror the Continent, where people feel less pressure to race toward oblivion by closing time. Will those measures be enough to shift a culture that's prized getting sozzled since the Vikings? Andrew McNeill, director of the pro-temperance Institute of Alcohol Studies, says the chance that "fiddling around with drinking hours is going to make British people into Italians is about as likely as my becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury." But James Purnell, the Minister in charge of the new licensing law, says that's only one part of the strategy. "Cultural change takes a long time," he says, "and only happens through a range of influences."

"Short-term interventions" are another promising approach. One British program stations a counselor in court to identify defendants who might regret the one or 10 too many that got them there and offer help. And ambulances in Frankfurt now take under-21s picked up for "coma drinking" to a 42-bed unit specializing in alcohol problems. After they sober up, about half agree to counseling. Some attend group sessions with adult alcoholics, "people who seem normal to them," says Wilfried Köhler, the unit's chief doctor. "They could be their uncles or dads and here they are in detox, many of them without family or jobs thanks to the booze. Their frankness and willingness to admit they are responsible for their habit is the most effective way of getting to the kids."

Over the next few holiday weeks a lot of European kids will be joining, aping or rebelling against their elders with celebratory snorts. Their parents may be relieved: at least it's not drugs. Alcohol is so embedded in European life that its cost to young people — measured one car accident, one boozy fight, one date rape at a time — may not quite be perceived as part of a huge common problem. The E.U. is preparing an alcohol policy to reduce abuse, while at the same time trying to force Sweden to loosen its tough alcohol controls in the name of the common market. Such contradictory impulses litter the political capitals of Europe, because — for all the hue and cry about botellones and bingers — governments are not eager to stand against the major cultural and commercial force that is booze. "I know it could be harmful," says Gryzicka, sipping a beer in Warsaw. "But I think I can control it." She had better be able to, because she won't get much help from the rest of us.

With reporting by Lisa Abend and Jane Walker/Madrid, Mairéad Carey/Dublin, Jessica Carsen/Croydon, Mimi Murphy/ Rome, Beata Pasek/Warsaw, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen and Ursula Sautter/Frankfur

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