Booze cruisers

"Normalising" drinking at home isn't changing teenagers' binge-drinking culture, say health campaigners calling for price hikes and advertising clampdowns. 

- SARAH CATHERALL

Just before midnight on a Saturday, Wellington's Courtenay Place is awash with inebriated people staggering along footpaths and stumbling into bars. If you take this cohort as representative of New Zealand's wider alcohol scene, about a third of the 18- to 24-year-old bar patrons among them will binge drink. Typically, they will have also preloaded, drinking at their flats or at home to take advantage of cheaper prices at off-licences or online.

Adolescent, underage drinkers are more likely to be drinking at home or at private parties, where their intake can be more difficult to monitor than if they have slipped into a bar on a fake ID. More than half the underage drinkers surveyed by the Addressing Alcohol Harm in Adolescents project undertaken by health promotion group Alcohol Healthwatch said they got alcohol from their parents, a statistic that worries health watchdogs.

Alcohol has never been more affordable, more heavily marketed or more accessible, say researchers and Alcohol Healthwatch. It was labelled in a recent University of Otago, Wellington study as our most harmful drug - worse than methamphetamine or synthetic cannabis - but critics are concerned that getting drunk continues to be the normal drinking style for 18-to 24 year-olds.

The New Zealand Health Survey (2020) found young adults aged 18-24 are our most hazardous drinkers: more than one in three (34.9%) drink excessively, a rate that has not improved in the eight years since the indicator was first introduced.

Hazardous drinking is defined internationally by a World Health Organisation (WHO) scale based on 10 questions covering frequency of drinking, amount consumed and experience of negative outcomes. A score of 8 or more defines hazardous drinking, a pattern that places the drinker and others at risk of harm.