tries, Dutch youth drinks a lot. But why?
“It’s a situation that has evolved gradually, and there a many causes for it: availability, prices and the attitudes of adults all have an effect, which is why my book addresses parents and policy makers in particular.”
Your book presses home the fact that alcohol reduces the intelligence of young people. How much exactly do you need to drink for that to happen?
“If you drink large amounts, drink often or at a young age, it will knock points off your IQ. The number of nerve cells increases until you are eighteen, and the number of connections between those cells rises until you are 21. Your brain is particularly vulnerable to the detrimental effects of alcohol in that period.”
Students are older than eighteen, but some drink heavily. Is that wrong?
“Your prefrontal lobe will have finished developing by the time you are 22, but if you drink too much, you run the risk of getting Korsakoff´s syndrome. Here in the Netherlands, people are suffering from it at an increasingly younger age: I have seen men in their thirties who are suffering from it; they started drinking as students.”
But you have to drink idiotic amounts before you develop that, don´t you?
“An American colleague of mine studies brain scans of drinkers and you can already see damage in certain areas of the brain in people who drink five or more beers twice a week.”
Oh dear…
“Recently, I saw a student who had a blood alcohol level of 2.8. He claimed that he had only drunk beer – impossible. He could vaguely remember that he was so drunk that he lay down on the floor, at which point his friends gave him something else to drink, which turned out to be gin. That sort of thing was beyond the pale when I was a student.”
For years, you have been advocating raising the permissible age for drinking to eighteen, and you repeat this in your book.
“Our current alcohol legislation dates from 1881. Twenty other European countries have raised that age to eighteen. Fewer children are being born here, and we must to take better care of the ones we have.” BB