Booze culture getting worse - top cop

It is time to reverse Australia's slide into a binge-drinking culture, one of the nation's top police officers has said.

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione called today for wide-ranging reforms in the areas of policing, licensing and treatment, to counter what he called a "drink to get drunk" culture.

Alcohol-related crime was estimated to cost Australia $1.7 billion a year, Mr Scipione said, but the full financial burden, taking into account health care and other areas, could be as much as $15 billion annually.

Three-quarters of all calls to police in NSW were connected to alcohol in some way, he said.
Binge-drinking had been normalised, Mr Scipione said.

"Drinking habits have changed," he said. "What many young Australians are doing now is going out determined to get drunk, whatever the consequences."

Among his suggested reforms, Mr Scipione proposed constructing sobering-up facilities as an alternative to police custody for heavily intoxicated people.

"These are centres which have worked particularly well in our indigenous communities across Australia," he told the Seven Network.

The commissioner also singled out an increase in "vertical drinking" establishments. These venues encourage a faster rate of drinking because there are few places to sit or to put down your drink between mouthfuls.

"The more you consume, the quicker you consume it, the drunker you get, so this is an emerging problem," Mr Scipione said.

Large venues capable of holding as many as 3000 people, often concentrated in the same area, along with extended trading hours, combined with rivers of booze to cause police a massive headache, he said.

"Large numbers, particularly with this drink-to-get-drunk culture we are encountering more and more these days, relates, from our perspective, to significant problems," Mr Scipione said.

Reforms to alcohol taxation should be considered, he said, including examining whether harm would be reduced by aligning taxation to alcoholic content and providing tax incentives for the sale of low-strength drinks.

Mr Scipione also called for licensees to be more accountable for serving alcohol to underage drinkers. Individuals also needed to take more responsibility, he said.

The Australian