Huesik: Korean for binge drinking

A classic South Korean working day usually ends up in Huesiks, binge drinking sessions cast as social events. But behind the drunken smiles lurks an alarming variety of health problems that stem from heavy drinking.

Night falls on Seoul as workers leave their offices. It is time for Huesiks, boozy meals shared by coworkers at least twice a week. Taking part in them is highly recommended as those who do not can find themselves quickly ostracized from the group.

This means drinking a lot; and quickly. Part of the aim is to find summon courage to lose one’s inhibition and criticize the boss. We follow one group as they treated a client in a Japanese restaurant. They are going to talk business. But, above all, they will raise toast after toast. That's already four in less than ten minutes.

Soju is Korean people’s favorite drink. It is made of rice, potatoes or barley, is very cheap and usually contains about 25% of alcohol. So, a few hours and several bars later, these employees aren’t exactly in professional shape anymore.

Having left the bar, these heavy drinkers drunkenly wait on subway platforms or stumble out onto Seoul’s streets. One businessman we come across has drunk one bottle of whisky every day for the last 20 years. Despite a recent recovery from stomach cancer, he remains a heavy drinker.

In Korea, warnings against heavy drinking are still very rare. Advertising is legal. Yet, for the local authorities, the cost of alcohol abuse is mounting. One in 10 korean adults suffers from various health problems stemming from heavy drinking. And it is not about to change as average alcohol consumption rose again in September.
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source: France 24

Survey: Alcohol abuse remains problem at UConn

STORRS, Conn. --One of every four University of Connecticut students say they have blacked out from heavy drinking during Spring Weekend festivities, according to a new survey.

The review, conducted by UConn's Center for Survey Research and Analysis, also says two of every five students surveyed say they got "severely drunk" during the annual party.

Some UConn officials said they were shocked by the findings, especially since the university has stepped up enforcement and offers many alcohol-free recreation events. However, national experts and some students say they were less surprised.

The survey mirrors national trends, said Brandon Busteed, founder and chief executive officer of Outside the Classroom, a company that works with colleges to fight high-risk drinking.

"That is a very frightening statistic, but I don't think it's too far out from national statistics, which is kind of depressing," Busteed said of the 25 percent blackout figure.

The university's Department of Wellness and Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Services commissioned the survey to gauge what students want out of Spring Weekend, and how UConn can make it safer and more memorable for them.

The festivities, which occur just before final exams, draw up to 20,000 students and their guests each spring.

Unsanctioned off-campus parties at nearby apartment complexes frequently generate dozens of arrests, assaults and ambulance trips for inebriated and injured party guests.

UConn Spring Weekend events gained national attention in 1998, when a party in an off-campus parking lot led to rioting. This year, the student newspaper's editor said she was sexually accosted at one of the parties and wrote about it on the paper's front page.

A committee examining Spring Weekend has been holding informal hearings for the past two weeks to get suggestions from police, doctors, student, apartment complex owners, Mansfield town employees and others.

The survey results come from an online questionnaire sent in March to all of the approximately 15,000 UConn undergraduates ages 18 or older on the Storrs campus.

The survey did not include the most recent Spring Weekend in April, since it was distributed about a month earlier.

A total of 2,571 students responded, with 1,709 answering the question about whether they had blacked out due to substance use during a Spring Weekend.

The survey defined "blacking out" as being conscious, but having no recollection due to substance use. It distinguished blacking out from "passing out," which was described as being unresponsive due to substance use.

Twelve percent of students reported passing out at a Spring Weekend.

"I agree that it's a shocking number," said Julie Elkins, assistant to the vice president for student affairs at UConn. "In some ways, it reminds me of folks who usually drink responsibly, and then New Year's Eve hits and they make choices they normally don't. I think Spring Weekend is their New Year's Eve."

Given the level of drinking, Student Body President Ryan McHardy said, the number of blackouts reported was right on the mark.

"Am I surprised? No, and it's unfortunate. That's the behavior I've seen in Spring Weekend," McHardy said.

"There's an expectation that's going to happen," McHardy said. "That, to me, seems to be the No. 1 issue that needs to be addressed."
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source: http://www.boston.com

Binge drinking 'out of control'

Binge drinking is "spiraling out of control" in Grey-Bruce, with a third of residents who drink alcohol reporting engaging in it during the past year, a figure 12 per cent higher than both the provincial and national averages.

The percentage of local drinkers over the age of 12 binge drinking nearly doubled to 34 per cent in 2007 from 18 per cent in 2001, according to the Canadian Community Health Survey, which monitors a range of health indicators including alcohol and tobacco use.

"For the most part, most places in Canada have not doubled. These numbers are just really high," said Matthew Myatt, associate epidemiologist for the Grey Bruce Health Unit.

"I wouldn't say we expected to see the jump in the numbers because this is really high, 12 per cent (higher than the average) is huge."

The provincial average for binge drinking by those who drink alcohol was 21.2 per cent in 2007, the national average was 21.8 per cent. Binge drinking is considered to be having five or more drinks on one occasion at least once per month in the past 12 months.

"Alcohol abuse through binge drinking is spiraling out of control in Grey Bruce," the health unit said in a news release. "Alcohol is the most popular drug in Grey Bruce and its abuse is on the rise."

Research has proven that adverse health effects due to drinking begin at the "binge drinking" level of consumption, Myatt added.

According to Dr. Geoffrey Fong, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo, binge drinking is heavily affected by social context and peer pressure.

"If you start drinking at a young age it becomes a problem that quickly becomes a social epidemic because it's highly visible and spreads throughout a social group," said Fong, an expert in global health issues and the effects of alcohol on social behaviour.

"What initially may seem like a small increase in drinking will blossom fairly quickly because of social effects."

The local co-ordinator of the FOCUS Community Program says the goal of program is to prevent problems, including injuries and chronic diseases, associated with drinking and drug use.

"If adults that drink alcohol can begin to assess the amount and their patterns of drinking, we hope there will be a change in the culture of drinking in Grey Bruce and also a reduction in the burden of disease," Marie Barclay, a public health nurse, said in a news release.
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source: Owen Sound Sun Times

Simplistic response to a complex problem

The culture of binge drinking is a plague on Britain. It causes misery in some of the country's most deprived areas and transforms even the most genteel town centres into no-go areas at weekends. With this bleak context in mind, it is understandable that ministers in Scotland are considering an increase in the legal age for purchasing alcohol from off-licences and supermarkets from 18 to 21. The role of alcohol in fuelling yobbish behaviour north of the border is exacerbated by its effect on health. Scotland has one of the fastest growing rates of liver cirrhosis in the world. Does it not make sense to make alcohol harder to get hold of, if only for teenagers?

The answer is no. While one can sympathise with politicians wanting to take radical action to curb binge drinking, the remedy does not lie in simplistic legislative responses. Just as new 24-hour drinking laws did not lead to the boom in alcohol-related crime that some scaremongering press predicted, so raising the legal age of buying alcohol from off-licences will not bring about a dramatic decline in the type of anti-social behaviour associated with binge drinking.

There are several practical problems with the policy under consideration by the Scottish executive.

Allowing those aged between 18 and 21 to drink alcohol but not purchase it makes no sense. The fact that they would be able to buy alcohol in pubs and clubs would further confuse the situation. It also seems absurd that an 18-year-old will be able to vote, smoke and drink, but not buy alcohol from a supermarket.

The emphasis should be on enforcing the law, not changing it. Ample powers already exist to tackle the effects of binge drinking. In many cases, binge drinkers are underage teenagers. The police already have the power to move them on from public spaces and confiscate their alcohol.

They could also take more action against off-licences selling alcohol to the underage, or against those passing on alcohol to those not old enough to buy it for themselves. The main flaw to the proposal, however, is that it fails to grasp that Britain's binge-drinking problem, shared elsewhere in northern Europe, is a cultural one.

As such, the key to fighting it lies not in fiddling with the statute book, but in fostering a longer-term change in attitudes. Such a shift can only be achieved through a concerted education campaign that makes all of us rethink our relationship with alcohol. It is no quick fix, but it remains the only realistic way of creating a more responsible attitude towards drinking in Britain.
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source: The Independent U.K

Surprising Findings About Drinking Behavior At College Parties

* Most studies of college-student drinking have looked at the individual, and have relied on self reports.

* New findings gathered from on-the-spot observations show that parties with drinking games can predict higher blood-alcohol concentrations (BrACs).

* Young women at theme parties, especially with sexualized themes and costumes, drink more heavily than men.

Most studies of drinking by college students have focused on individual factors like attitudes, and have relied on self reports. A uniquely designed study instead had researchers visit college parties, gathering data on the spot. Findings revealed that drinking games and themed parties are associated with higher levels of drinking.

Results are published in the January issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"Most studies use survey methods that require people to recall their drinking behavior - days, weeks or months prior - and such recall is not always accurate," noted J.D. Clapp, director of the Center for Alcohol and Drug Studies and Services at San Diego State University and corresponding author for the study. "By going out into the field and doing observations and surveys, including breath tests for alcohol concentrations, we were able to mitigate many of the problems associated with recall of behavior and complex settings."

"In addition," said James A. Cranford, research assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, "this study is unique in its focus on both individual- and environmental-level predictors of alcohol involvement. Rather than relying on students' reports of the environment, researchers actually gained access to college-student parties and made detailed observations about the characteristics of these parties."

For three academic semesters, researchers conducted a multi-level examination of 1,304 young adults (751 males, 553females) who were attending 66 college parties in private residences located close to an urban public university in southern California. Measures included observations of party environments, self-administered questionnaires, and collection of blood-alcohol concentrations (BrACs).

"Both individual behavior and the environment matter when it comes to student-drinking behavior," said Clapp. "At the individual level, playing drinking games and having a history of binge drinking predicted higher BrACs. At the environmental level, having a lot of intoxicated people at a party and themed events predicted higher BrACs. One of the more interesting findings was that young women drank more heavily than males at themed events. It is rare to find any situation where women drink more than men, and these events tended to have sexualized themes and costumes."

"Conversely," added Cranford, "students who attended parties in order to socialize had lower levels of drinking. Interestingly, larger parties were associated with less drinking. Dr. Clapp and colleagues speculate that there may simply be less alcohol available at larger parties, and I suspect this may be the case."

Both Clapp and Cranford hope this study's design will help future research look at "the whole picture."

"From a methodological standpoint, our study illustrates that is possible and important to examine drinking behavior in real-world settings," noted Clapp. "It is more difficult than doing web surveys and the like, but provides a much richer data set. Secondly, environmental factors are important. Much of the current research on drinking behavior focuses on individual characteristics and ignores contextual factors. Yet both are important to our understanding of drinking behavior and problems."

On a more practical level, Clapp urged caution on the part of party hosts as well as guests. "Hosts should not allow drinking games and students should avoid playing them," he said. "Such games typically result in large amounts of alcohol being consumed very quickly - a dangerous combination." He and his colleagues are currently testing party-host interventions that may help, and also plan to further examine themed parties in greater detail, other alcohol-related problems occurring at all types of parties, and drinking in a bar environment.

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER) is the official journal of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. Co-authors of the ACER paper, "Person and Environment Predictors of Blood Alcohol Concentrations: A Multi-Level Study of College Parties," were: J.W. Min, A.M. Shillington, M.B. Reed and J.M. Ketchie, all of the Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Studies and Services at San Diego State University. The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Source:

J.D. Clapp
San Diego State University

James A. Cranford
University of Michigan

The People Joins Xmas Ambulance Crews

Her face is smeared with vomit, her skirt has ridden up to show her knickers and her stockings are round her knees.

The pretty 21-year-old lies slumped in the back of the crowded ambulance whimpering and flailing her limbs as paramedic Brian Hayes tries to get a drip in her arm.

Brian shakes his head wearily and says: "She's totally out of it. God knows how much she's had or where her friends have gone.

"She could have been raped and wouldn't have known a thing."

Fellow paramedic Phil Guthrie tries to hold a sick bowl under her chin while propping up a semiconscious man called Dave and trying to bandage the bleeding head of a paralytic OAP who's just lost control of his bowels.

Welcome to the front line of boozed-up Britain - and another night of battle for our 999 heroes. It's 2.30am in central London on Friday - the biggest night of the year for office parties.

Brian, Phil and 999 team-mate Kevin Carroll are dealing with their Eleventh drunk in seven hours - and will treat another Nine before dawn.

Across the capital, dozens more crews have been picking up the battered casualties of the UK's most deadly weapon - alcohol.

In the two years since 24-hour drinking was launched, London has seen a 12 per cent rise in booze-related calls.

Alcohol admissions to hospitals have Tripled.

And across the country, A&Es are regularly clogged up with drunks, costing taxpayers £500 Million a year.

Brian, 37, said: "The level of drunkenness is ridiculous. "I fear we are fighting a losing battle and will soon reach breaking point.

"Every time an ambulance is called out it costs £167.

"Between November last year and this September we answered 38,849 alcohol-related calls - that's £6.5million of taxpayers' money.

"And while we are mopping up sick and dealing with obnoxious or violent drunks, we hear calls coming over the radio to real life threatening emergencies.

"How would you feel if your dad had a heart attack and we could not get to him because we were dealing with a p***ed-up teenager?"

Brian has pioneered London's first "Booze Bus" ambulance which targets alcohol-related calls at peak periods to free up other crews for genuine emergencies.

He said: "More and more kids are getting paralytic.

"That's setting a time bomb for a surge in liver disease and health problems in the next decade."

And fellow ambulance man Michael Taylor, 42, warned drunk girls are easy targets for sex attackers. He said: "They match lads drink for drink then go off to the toilets, collapse in a cubicle and wake up an hour later with their knickers round their ankles, no idea where they are and terrified they've been sexually assaulted.

"Their friends say, 'Someone must have spiked her drink'. But when they sober up may they admit how much they drunk. Yet an expert told me there's not one proven case of Rohypnol or GHB date-rape drugs being used in the UK."

On Friday, the Booze Bus got its first call at 7.15 to a drunk who had collapsed in a Euston garden after an office bash.

Brian and Phil took him to University College Hospital - where he turned nasty and was arrested. Next was a call to a 49-year-old man slumped semi-conscious on a wall in Trafalgar Square.

The ambulance was diverted to Vauxhall Bridge Road, where a 48-year-old man had smashed his head open when he fell while trying to swig from a bottle of vodka.

Next they picked up Jim, a 40-year-old chartered surveyor who collapsed at a Chinatown eaterie after a party.

Pals had tied him to a chair for safety before dialling 999.

They also picked up 18-year-old Dan who was wandering shirtless round Leicester Square with his face covered in blood.

Next was Lisa, a pretty 25-year-old hit in the face by a flying glass at her office party in Aldwych.

They then headed to Soho where drunken designer Lars, 30, had tried to jump a 5ft railing for a pee - and bust his ankle.

Brian said: "It should be agony but he can barely feel it."

He also treated a man slumped on a nearby bench.

At 1.45am the crew collected a pensioner who hit his head in Holborn - then raced to a club off Regent Street to treat drunken Dave and the 21-year-old girl.

Brian said: "She'll come round in hospital scared, ashamed and feeling like s**t." And he told how medics were regularly attacked by drunks.

He said: "I've been thumped, kicked and bitten and had to have tests for HIV and hepatitis.

"I don't know what's happened to our society."

Alcohol Concern said: "We must crack down on irresponsible pubs and clubs which sell very cheap booze then leave the emergency services to clean up the mess."

I was on a drip... Mum was terrified

Tv Researcher Lisa, 31, of London, is single and tells of her nightmare binge that ended in hospital last Christmas.

I would never have called myself a big drinker but at our work lunch I started on champagne, then red wine, then Baileys. By 6pm I was drunk but we went to a pub, then a club.

We had shots of Sambuca and I staggered to the toilets - pals came looking but I'd stumbled outside without my coat in the freezing cold.

A passer-by found me lying semi-conscious covered in vomit. I'd lost control of my other bodily functions too.

This good Samaritan, whom I never found, rang an ambulance. The first thing I can remember is being slapped in the face by a nurse trying to rouse me.

I was on a drip and vomited for another three hours. My mum was called and said I was Homer Simpson yellow.

She was terrified my liver was failing. I couldn't stop crying and felt disgusted I'd tied up an ambulance.

I was off work for two days but later started a diet and exercise regime which I've stuck to. I'm terrified of getting drunk again.

source: People

Mother, son warn how both struggled with his alcoholism

Toren Volkmann started drinking when he was 14 or 15. By the time he was 22, he was a self-described “full-blown alcoholic” whose life revolved around his next drink.

Yet his parents had no idea of the scope of their son’s addiction.

Toren and his mother, Chris Volkmann, shared the story of their struggle with alcoholism Tuesday at Magna Vista and Bassett high schools, and they will continue to speak in the area today. The presentations were organized by Communities Helping Improve Local Lives (CHILL), a youth task force that encourages teens not to use drugs, alcohol or tobacco.

Like most teenagers, “it wasn’t ever my intention to have any problems with alcohol,” said Toren, now 28. “I just wanted it to be fun.”

A student athlete who did well in school, Toren said he started drinking in high school and soon earned a reputation as a partier. He was brought home by the police more than once for underage drinking and kicked off of four sports teams, but Toren still didn’t think he had a problem. Although his parents grounded him, took away privileges and talked to him about drinking in moderation, they didn’t realize the seriousness of the situation either, Chris said.

The family should have done what Chris tells parents to do every time she shares her story: They should have talked about it more seriously, she said.

Instead, Toren left the family’s home in Olympia, Wash., to go to college in Southern California. There, his drinking only worsened.

“Everything was magnified and intensified” at college, Toren said. “All I was concerned about was drinking.”

Kicked out of the dorms by the end of his freshman year, Toren met with a counselor who told him to attend 10 meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous before he returned to school the next year.

Although he went to two meetings, Toren said, he didn’t really believe he needed to be there.

“I said, ‘My name is Toren and I’m an alcoholic,’” he recalled. “... But I didn’t really know if I believed that. I just wasn’t ready to listen to what they had to say.”

Toren told his parents he was going to the meetings, but Chris didn’t ask him about it.

“I missed the opportunity to talk,” she said.

Despite his drinking problem, Toren graduated from college and entered the Peace Corps. While working in Paraguay, he sometimes went two or three weeks without drinking. But he struggled with withdrawal symptoms, such as sweating and shaking, and he always went back to binge drinking.

Eventually, Toren went to a nurse and asked for help. He was flown back to the United States, where he checked into a 30-day treatment center and spent six months in a halfway house for recovering alcoholics.

Now sober for four years, Toren lives in Portland, Ore. He and Chris travel the country sharing their experiences and talking about the book they wrote together, “From Binge to Blackout.”

As they spoke Tuesday, Chris and Toren shared facts about alcohol and its effects on teenagers.

Among them:

• More than 10 million people in the United States between the ages of 12 and 20 are heavy drinkers.

• Because people’s brains do much of their developing during adolescence, binge drinking is more dangerous for teenagers than it is for adults. Drinking as a teenager can affect the way your brain processes alcohol for the rest of your life.

• Having one family member who is an alcoholic makes a person four times more likely to develop an alcohol problem.

Toren said he knows it is difficult for teenagers to believe alcoholism can affect them. Ten years ago, he might not have listened to a speaker like himself, he said.

But he hopes not all the students are like he was.

“Even if I’m not affecting the kids that are just like me, I might affect 10 to 15 kids who are on the fence,” he said.

source: Martinsville Bulletin

Heavy drinking, conduct disorder linked to high-risk sexual behavior

Psychiatry researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that a clinical diagnosis of alcohol dependence in young adults is associated with having a high number of sex partners.

"Some participants in the study reported 50 or 100 partners, and research shows — and common sense tells you — that the more sex partners you have, the more likely you'll encounter someone with an STD," says first author Patricia Cavazos-Rehg, Ph.D., research instructor in the Department of Psychiatry. "Chances also increase for unintended pregnancies and other health complications."

The study, published in the December issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, also found links between a conduct disorder diagnosis and high numbers of sexual partners as well as between problem drinking and more partners. Of the three, however, alcohol dependence had the most influence on number of sex partners.

Alcohol dependence is an excessive use of alcohol that's harmful to physical and mental health. Some alcohol-dependent people drink every day. Others may drink only sporadically but consume large amounts of alcohol when they do drink. That sort of binge drinking is particularly common in adolescents and young adults, like those surveyed in this study. Problem drinkers, on the other hand, have many of the same symptoms, and may go on to become dependent, but they were not alcohol dependent when the study was conducted.

Conduct disorder is a disruptive disorder, like ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder. Its symptoms tend to include truancy from school, setting fires, getting into fights or being cruel to people or animals.

Of those in this study who were alcohol dependent, 45 percent reported having 10 or more sexual partners. In addition, 37 percent of those with a conduct disorder diagnosis had at least 10 partners.

Previous studies have linked heavy drinking and conduct disorder to high-risk sexual behavior. This study focused specifically on the number of partners, and it defines high risk using a larger number than typically seen in the psychiatric literature.

"To my knowledge, most research in young adults has used a standard of 'up to six' sex partners when examining risk," Cavazos-Rehg says. "But the average number of partners for the people in this study was 9.26, so instead of using 'six or more' partners as our standard for high risk, we increased that number to 10."

The researchers conducted personal interviews with 601 people between 18 and 25 years old. All were unmarried and related to alcohol-dependent individuals who participated in the national Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), an ongoing project involving interviews and DNA samples from more than 10,000 people. The COGA database includes individuals from inpatient and outpatient alcohol treatment centers and their families. Families in the COGA study usually have multiple members with alcohol dependence.

"We categorized these subjects according to three levels of alcohol involvement — non-dependent, problem drinking and alcohol dependent — and demonstrated how a stepwise increase from non-dependence to problematic alcohol use to alcohol dependence is associated with a higher number of sexual partners," says Cavazos-Rehg. "We found that 22 percent of the non-dependent people had 10 or more partners, compared to 31 percent of problem drinkers and 45 percent of those who were alcohol dependent. We also found a risk for a high number of sexual partners among those with conduct disorder, independent of their level of alcohol involvement. And those with both alcohol dependence and conduct disorder were at greatest risk of having a high number of sex partners."

Cavazos-Rehg suggests when young people are treated for alcohol problems — from inpatient treatment for alcohol dependence to emergency care following an alcohol-related car accident— it might be a good idea to screen them for STDs or HIV infection and to discuss safe sex practices. Personnel at STD clinics also might want to ask patients about their alcohol use and provide referrals to alcohol-related treatment centers.

"Perhaps clinicians can work together to treat both problems," she says. "A better understanding of alcohol dependence and conduct disorder could become part of a comprehensive strategy for reducing the transmission of STDs and unintended pregnancies."

source: Washington University