The name of the game is vodka

The Scottish Government suggests that raising the legal age for buying alcohol might help reduce underage drinking. But teens who want to drink will slip through the net, and – if my clients are anything to go by – they mostly slip to wherever the vodka is. Not one bottle but several. Bought from “someone my friend knows” and paid for by Nana – “she said it was okay if we stuck to two bottles”.

A few years back, folk in the States were worried that brewery sites were providing a cyber-playground for young people, with downloads of wallpaper and videos, and on-screen games heavily pushing the brand concerned. It’s certainly true that you can type any date of birth into the home page of a brewery site and get through the door under-age, but when I checked today, much of the content didn’t seem cool enough to attract teens. Not many of my clients will thirst to play Whack a Sheep, although the Skyy Vodka group on MySpace may well be full of teens. If you want to see what goes on in the other universe, Bacardi’s website probably represents the kind of thing the researchers were referring to.

My understanding is that teens and, increasingly, pre-teens are intent on attachment to a group, avoiding overwhelming feelings of vulnerability, and perhaps also resisting what they see as conformity – though the amount of alcohol drunk in many of their homes would imply cultural imitation. Others will be doing the equivalent of casually dropping a bomb on themselves: the sudden huge intake of alcohol causing an altered experience that is tantamount to angry self-harming.

I wonder, in fact, if state-dependent learning comes in here too. All experiences when drunk will be encoded in the brain in a very different way from when the person is sober. These desirable experiences will include:

– getting along fine with others
– having fun
– forgetting worries
– undertaking risky ventures with no fear
– enjoying the party atmosphere.

Just as learning is often state dependent, so too will be the recall of those experiences. What young person will not be tempted to down another two bottles to be able to re-experience all that when life gets too much? Or even slightly humdrum?

Our best bet as counsellors of teens is to help them think what they want for their own bodies before the addiction takes hold. There’s a self-test for young people here, called How are Alcohol and Drugs Affecting Your Life?, which could easily be adapted to suit particular clients.

Manchester University has summarised its work in connection with teens who binge-drink – and very brief counselling/motivational interviewing seems to come out well, as does targetting schools. If you want to contribute to schools addressing the issue, excellent NICE guidance and information for such work is here.