To curb binge drinking, follow Israel’s lead

The scene outside a bar in Tel Aviv looks very different from the scene outside a college party in the United States. 

Young American college kids may spend their evenings slumped over a curb, with heads in hands and consciousness in question. Young Israelis actually seem to be enjoying their evenings out. 

That’s not to say American college students don’t also enjoy their time out, but rather that the Israelis will typically remember those nights.  

Going out as an underage college student in America is a blur of cheap vodka and swigs of orange juice from a shared bottle. The result of these wild evenings often includes “blacking out,” a badge of honor in some circles.  

So what’s going on? Why does it seem as if young Israelis have a better handle on alcohol consumption than their American peers? I spent this summer working and living as an of-age adult in Israel, and I discovered revealing disparities in the laws and culture surrounding alcohol. 

In Israel, the drinking age is 18 and alcohol cannot be purchased in stores after 11 p.m. The Knesset also limits advertising and marketing of alcohol and imposes increased taxes on alcohol.  

According to a Times of Israel story, alcohol consumption in Israel is low. Binge drinking, which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says is a serious health hazard for youth, is lower in Israel than in other developed nations.

Binge drinking in the United States is on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 90 percent of alcohol consumed by adults under the age of 21 in the United States is in the form of binge drinking. 

The drinking age in the United States is 21. For many college students younger than 21, the primary objective seems to be to consume high volumes quickly. 

Given that young people use and abuse alcohol at a staggeringly high rate, we should take action to address this epidemic and our outdated laws governing alcohol consumption. 

Reforming laws surrounding alcohol can help to turn an unsafe, irresponsible and illegal activity to a regulated and safer one. According to the OECD report, individuals of higher socio-economic status as well as higher education levels are more likely to abuse alcohol. College students are at risk. 

Israel’s experience resonates with the finding of health professionals. According to a report in the U.S. National Library of Medicine — National Institutes of Health, policies that limit the hours of alcohol sale by more than two hours “might be a means of reducing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms.”

In the United States, we seem to believe that a higher drinking age will teach our children a lesson that alcohol is for more mature individuals. This is a failed experiment that did not work during Prohibition and does not work now. Rather than an absolute ban that encourages buying “by the bottle” late at night, we should encourage better behavior. Better instead to have young people drinking in bars, ordering drinks that are measured in alcohol content one at a time. 

By lowering the drinking age and imposing stricter rules about purchasing alcohol, we have a better chance at getting to the root of the issue — binge drinking. 

During my two months in Tel Aviv, I noticed how young Americans simply didn’t have the opportunity to binge drink. By the time we finished dinner, stores had stopped selling alcohol. The 11:01 p.m. dilemma ensued. Either we paid for expensive alcohol at bars, or we stopped drinking. We drank less. 

The moral of the story for those of us older than18 in Israel was that we’d plan our night out. We consumed alcohol over a longer period of time, typically with dinner, which is safer. If we did not have this foresight, the system punished you a little bit by making your ability to get belligerently drunk or “blacking out” that much harder. 

Israel has often been referred to as the “startup nation.” Perhaps in addition to its technological achievements, we Americans might now follow its lead to “start up” changing our attitudes toward alcohol and making our kids safer and healthier.

Lauren Sonnenberg is a junior at Northwestern University studying journalism and history. She recently completed an internship at Haaretz newspaper in Israel.