Canadians cautioned to watch for binge drinking behaviour on St. Patrick’s Day

Perhaps this St. Patrick’s Day weekend you plan on having one bourbon, one scotch and one beer … and that’s before you head to the pub todrink more with your friends.

Well, you may want to rethink those plans.

Just last week, several college students in California celebrating “St. Fratty’s Day” were injured when the roof caved in due to many revelers standing on it. The partiers were reportedly “brewfing,” a term meaning drinking beer while on a roof.

Here in Canada, alcohol was responsible for a sobering 8.22 per cent of all deaths under the age of 70 and 7.23 per cent of all days spent in hospital, according to a report by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And 15 to 20 per cent of Canadians meet the criteria for alcohol disorders, according to two doctors, who conducted a review of alcohol misuse published last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Kids and young adults are starting to misuse alcohol at startlingly young ages. Binge drinking is generally defined as having five or more units of alcohol for a male, or four or more drinks for a female, on one occasion. A study led by Dr. Esme Fuller-Thomson, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, found four per cent of Canadians aged 12 to 14 years old had binge drank at least once in the preceding year. While another study she did found one in every eight teens aged 15 to 17 binge drank monthly.

Whether you’re 15 or 45 there is significant peer pressure to drink to excess on and in the lead up to St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. It’s certainly not just underage teens trying to drink their peers under the table.

“This glorification of drinking, I think it’s sad,” Fuller-Thomson said in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

Many countries around the world are struggling with heavy drinking. A World Health Organization report found Belarus holds the dubious title of heaviest drinking nation in the world. Residents in the eastern European country down 17.5 litres of pure alcohol per capita annually. Ireland, the birthplace of Guinness, did not even crack the top 20 coming in at 21, with 11.9 litres. Canada was well down the list, with 10.2 litres, but we were still well ahead of countries like Norway, Japan and India.

Many Canadians plan on “celebrating” Irish culture this weekend by downing one green beer after another.

“I have Irish roots, there’s more to it than green beer,” said the social work professor.

Consider limiting yourself to (gasp!) one pint, which can contain more than two units of alcohol. Dr. Fuller-Thomson suggests going to a St. Paddy’s Day parade this weekend instead. Or you could cook up an Irish stew, listen to some U2 and read up on the real St. Patrick, who it turns out is not actually the patron saint of binge drinking.

Cheers, or as they say in Ireland sláinte mhaith (good health), to that.