Trent Dalton
September 17, 2012
News Limited Network
A VOLATILE breed of weekend drinker is staggering into emergency wards across the country, defined as the ”wide-awake drunk” pulsing on a cocktail of alcoholic uppers and downers.
As more than 3500 Australians are hospitalised each year with brain injuries caused by assaults, leading medicos are spotlighting the links between youth violence and the mixing of stimulant caffeinated energy drinks with depressant alcoholic spirits.
”It’s the stimulant versus the sedative,” said Australian Medical Association president Dr Steve Hambleton.
”Your perception of your level of intoxication is decreased. So people are getting more and more intoxicated because they’re a ‘wide-awake drunk’ you might say. It started off with the alcopops but, really, it’s gone to another level.”
High-proof alcohols mix with taste-masking, high-energy drinks and the results spill into the floors of emergency wards every Friday and Saturday night, said Dr Hambleton, choking a long-overburdened national health system.
”People (are) presenting with glassings, broken cheekbones, depressed fractures, broken jaws, broken noses from punches,” Dr Hambleton said.
”Then every Monday morning everyone follows up after the weekend. Doctors run through their lists of fractured noses and facial reconstructions and next week it’s all on again.
Australian maxillofacial surgeon Dr Anthony Lynham has spent almost every Monday of his life since 1996 reconstructing the faces of young Australian men battered and cut during weekend benders. Picture: Mark Calleja Source: The Daily Telegraph
”It’s appalling. We have doctors who train for a decade to get to the start of their specialty, highly experienced medical people treating damage that is avoidable. They’re spending the first part of their week – every single week of their career – treating avoidable harm. That is not what a health system is about.”
Leading Australian maxillofacial surgeon Dr Anthony Lynham has spent almost every Monday of his life since 1996 reconstructing the faces of young Australian men battered and cut during weekend benders.
”Monday morning after Monday morning after Monday morning,” he said.
Last year, Dr Lynham’s team worked on 394 facial assault cases.
There are, he said, surgeons battling those numbers in every major city of Australia.
Mention the most popular vodka-based mixer of choice – aptly described by Hollywood screenwriter Diablo Cody as ”upper meets downer in an effervescent hybrid of bubble gum and junkie piss” – and Dr Lynham shudders in his theatre scrubs.
”It’s just absolutely ridiculous,” he said.
”I don’t know what effect they’re trying to achieve. They’re mixing one to down the effect of the other. But you end up with a disinhibited aggressive patient. Which is the worst combination of them all. You get the aggressiveness and hyperactivity from the stimulant drink plus the disinhibition from the alcohol. So they’re ready to go and there’s nothing to stop them from going. And it’s the worst of both worlds.”
Amy Pennay is a Research Fellow with Victoria’s Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre.
Last November she wrote a report called Alcohol and Caffeinated Energy Drinks: A Preliminary Study Exploring Patterns of Consumption and Associated Harms.
She said there are studies reflecting the links between alcoholic – energy drinks and aggression but more research is required into the brain’s reaction to them.
”What I do think is happening is energy drinks are facilitating increased alcohol consumption, so the stimulant effects are allowing people to stay out longer than they would otherwise and feel less drowsy and less acutely intoxicated,” she said.
”People are reporting drinking a lot more during sessions of alcohol and energy drinks as opposed to alcohol-only sessions. And, in general, the literature is supporting this finding.
Mixing energy drinks with alcohol can have disastrous consequences.
”It’s similar to the reason people might combine alcohol with an amphetamine when they go out. Something to do with the interaction gives you a positive intoxication. It’s a charged intoxication. An energetic intoxication.
”If you’re taking anything with alcohol that’s going to allow you to stay out much later than you normally would, consume more alcohol than your body is used to, that’s when you’re going to do things like accidentally step in front of traffic or be more likely to start a fight with somebody.”
Ms Pennay said alcoholic-energy drinks are now as popular as the ubiquitous “rum and Coke” in any nightclub.
For energy drink companies, she predicts, breaking into the lucrative world of youth drinking culture will continue to be a goldmine too glowing to resist.
”There are some venues selling energy drinks on tap,” she said.
”You can’t really regulate how much you’re having if you’re having it on tap. They’re supposed to comply with caffeine regulations but you can’t if you’re doing that.
”All venues sell them now. It came up in our study that combining alcohol with energy drinks is completely normalised. Everybody said 90 per cent of their friends are doing it.
”The branding is everywhere. Bar counters, refrigerators, prime positions behind the bar.”
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