Resources: Review - A feeble cure for the British drinking disease

The drinking that the Government wants reduced is what the media label "binge drinking", which Tony Blair calls the new British disease.

In reality, bingeing is neither a disease nor is it new, though it isn't healthy and there are new features. One feature is the mass bingeing that powers the commercialised night-time economy. The second is the fact that bingeing is now an accepted drinking style, even among the "underage". A notable aspect is that girls are even more likely than boys to binge drink.

It is these features that make bingeing such a hot political issue, and that have generated urgent demands for explanations, a task to which this report makes a modest contribution by presenting the findings of a survey of 14- to 17-year-olds with experience of bingeing in unsupervised settings.