How to approach the issue of alcohol with your child or teenager? How to react to their first binge? Many parents feel helpless. To help them, Guylaine Benech, a public health consultant and trainer, offers advice useful in one hundred short key ideas, in his book His first hangover. Positive prevention manual around alcohol (Publishroom Factory, 354 p., 22 euros), which she chose to self-publish.
Based on scientific literature, she draws up an edifying observation. Certainly, alcohol consumption has been decreasing in France since the 1960s, but the country ranks 6e place among the OECD countries that drink the most, with 10.4 liters of alcohol per year for those aged 15 and over. This is the equivalent of 2.3 standard drinks per day per person. As a reminder, alcohol is the cause of 41,000 deaths each year.
Among young people, the trend is also downward, but “They will get their first hangover on average at the age of 15”writes Guylaine Benech, and this without feeling like we are breaking a taboo, even though the legal age for access to alcoholic beverages is 18.
Banalization of “binge drinking”
On the other hand, occasional heavy drinking (API, equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon “binge drinking”, defined by at least five glasses on one occasion) has become commonplace. At 17 years old, 36.6% of them drink heavily at least once a month, according to the Escapad survey in 2022, mentioned by the author.
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However, alcohol is particularly toxic in adolescents, as brain maturation continues until around age 25. It is also causing alcoholic comas, black holes (« black out »), but also many deaths in road accidents, violence, especially sexual violence. Positive point: the proportion of 17-year-olds who have never drunk alcohol (one in five in 2022) continues to increase according to this survey.
Like public health actors, Mme Benech denounces the influence of the “alcohol lobby” on public authorities, preventing any real public health policy in this area. “The alcohol lobby has infiltrated the entire state apparatus (…) and grants itself a right of veto over campaigns”denounces Bernard Basset, president of the association Addictions France, who wrote the preface to the book with the specialist Mickael Naassila.
Dialogue as soon as possible
In 2016, the Court of Auditors denounced the lack of action to reduce alcohol consumption among young people and the shortcomings in prevention at school which “does not take up these subjects”. Because it is from childhood that the relationship with alcohol is built, insists Guylaine Benech.
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