What Is Pre-Drinking?

“Pre-drinking” refers to drinkers achieving a “buzz” or becoming intoxicated before going to a licensed premises, such as a bar, club, concert or sporting event.

Reports have come in from researchers who examined the drinking practices of 183 young adults (97 women, 86 men with a mean age of 23 years) from three higher education institutions in Switzerland.

They were trying to assess their alcohol consumption and drinking location on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays during five consecutive weeks by means of the participants’ cell phones. They got a total of 7,828 assessments for analysis for 1,441 evenings.

The authors of the study looked at the association between pre-drinking, on premises drinking levels and adverse outcomes.

Researcher Florian Labhart stated: “Pre-drinking is a pernicious drinking pattern that is likely to lead people to cumulate two normal drinking occasions one off-premise followed by one on-premise, and generally results in excessive alcohol consumption. Excessive consumption and adverse consequences are not simply related to the type of people who pre-drink, but rather to the practice of pre-drinking itself.”

With this excessive amount of drinking comes the risk of addiction and possible abuse.

I am sure that pre-drinking leads to further drinking throughout the evening. Here are some more interesting stats from Labhart:

“47.5 percent of the men and women in the study reported the following outcomes:

• hangover (40.7% men, 36.1% women)
• unplanned substance use (20.9% and 12.4%)
• blackouts (11.6% and 7.2%)
• unintended or unprotected sexual intercourse (8.1% and 5.2%)

Logically, given the large amounts of alcohol consumed, blackouts and hangover were especially prevalent on pre-drinking evenings.”

So these are some very interesting figures. I know when we were young, the thought of pre-drinking hardly ever entered our minds. We just looked forward to getting smashed at the party. Things do change. Another problem we need to look into is how and why human beings look for ways to get happy and usually end up harming themselves.

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