Veronica Callanan

Asda has taken the lead on clamping down on underage drinking by refusing to let anyone buy alcohol who looks under 18 and doesn’t have ID. I’m not going to go into the controversy of ID cards, as I don’t have a strong opinion either way on this. I do however think that retailers have to take responsibility for who they serve alcohol. With so many young people drinking we, as a society have to do something about this so it can only be a good thing that Asda are being responsible in this manner.

Unfortunately it is only a small part of the solution; anyone who’s been a teenager can remember how easy it is to get hold of alcohol, either from their parent’s drinks cabinet or getting an older friend to buy it. I was getting served from the age of 13, with make up I looked old enough and nobody seemed to bother IDing then. Ultimately making alcohol hard to get will make it more attractive to young people, especially if grown ups are still acting irresponsibly with alcohol.

Drinking and getting as drunk as possible seems to be a right of passage for most young people these days, when I was a teenager it made me feel confident, glamorous and sophisticated all the things I felt I wasn’t, of course there is nothing remotely glamorous about a 15 year old collapsed outside of a pub with a bucket of water being thrown over her lying in her own vomit as was the case with me.

Twenty years on you visit any high street on a Friday night and this would not be an uncommon sight, how terribly sad that we believe we’re having a good time, are we deluding ourselves?  I look back at my own drinking and can see it was all a sham, a big lie, I wasn’t having a good time I was just doing what everyone else was doing.

Not selling alcohol to under 18’s is a start, but we are going to have to go a lot further than that.

My name is Veronica and I am a reformed alcoholic. And I don’t want it to happen to you too, which is why I have trained as a therapist and have launched a training programme.

Today’s media has highlighted a proposal by Alcohol Concern urging the prosecution of parents who allow under 15-year-olds to drink. However, I don’t believe prosecuting adults this way is the right approach. I remember when I was a teenager; how anything that was forbidden immediately became more attractive and desirable. What I feel is needed is investment into young people’s emotional lives; we need to look at the root causes of why people drink to such extreme levels.

They are absolutely right in bringing this serious issue to our attention, the massive problem we have in this country due to alcohol abuse, how we have indeed created a culture where binge drinking has been so normalised that most young people see this behaviour as acceptable and emulate it. This isn’t the odd person from a bad background drinking too much, this is the majority of the population who drink, drinking more than is good for them and many too dangerous levels.

However, I don’t believe prosecuting adults this way is the right approach. I remember when I was a teenager; how anything that was forbidden immediately became more attractive and desirable. What I feel is needed is investment into young people’s emotional lives; we need to look at the root causes of why people drink to such extreme levels.

I was a teenage binge drinker, I remember lying in the gutter in my own vomit after pub closing time, the reason I drank was it changed how I felt, I had no confidence or self-esteem, I didn’t know how to have relationships with people. Alcohol made all of that better, it gave me confidence and bravado, I felt invincible, and then of course came the hangovers, depression, self loathing and guilt.

What I’m saying is we need to look at the reasons why young people and adults drink and start there; it has nothing to do with accessibility of alcohol. If someone has a drink problem and likes the effects of alcohol as much as I did, trust me they’ll find a way to get it.

I read with interest the recent reports about the rise of teenage binge drinking in this country. It seems to finally have come to our attention that we have a huge alcohol problem in this country. Not a day goes by without a shocking story of a 15 year-old admitted to hospital with alcohol poisoning or teenagers out of control on booze, the general public are horrified and I’m sure believe it’s not their adolescent.

The truth is we have succeeded in creating a culture that condones, encourages and mostly normalizes what is abnormal drinking. We have done this over the last 30 years or so, visit any town centre in the country over the weekend and you will see adults falling out of bars into the gutter in the quest of a ‘good time’. How can we be so surprised that are young people are copying this behavior? Young people want to be like adults, from when a little girl tries on Mummy’s high heels to having their first sneaky drags on a cigarette; they are trying to be cool, grown-up, just like us. They see what we do and want to copy it. Our culture has formed the belief that you can’t have a good time without getting drunk, that you drink in order to get p****d, that this is normal and harmless (the general public is still of the opinion that only smelly old men on benches have drink problems) we have passed this faulty belief onto our children and now we are surprised. Lots of suggestions have been made as to how to rectify this problem, there was a big debate that the change in licensing laws would inflict more damage, raising the drinking age has been considered, Alcohol Concern (the independent advisory body on alcohol) have even suggested that parents giving alcohol to under 15’s should be prosecuted. However all of these solutions seem to be wide of the mark, surely what we need to address is what’s underneath the problem, what’s driving the behavior, the way our culture thinks and relates to alcohol. Tackling are nations drink problem means a cultural shift that needs to start with the younger generation, we need to educate young people not on units and ’safe drinking’ (a complete failure if you look at the results we’re getting) and educate them on emotional intelligence, how to deal with stress, how to deal with failure, how to understand how they feel so they aren’t driven to use alcohol and other substances to cope with their feelings.

As a therapist I treat many successful individuals whose lives are falling apart because they have never been offered any guidance on how to deal with their emotional lives, they have turned to alcohol for fun, pleasure and finally to cope.

This is the behavior we are role modeling to our young people. They’re just doing what we’re doing.

The solution must start with looking at ourselves.