This report has been commissioned by the European Commission to provide a European Union wide overview of the market and regulation regarding types of alcoholic beverages with potentially particular appeal to minors. This topic is important because minors are at disproportionately greater risk from the harmful effects of alcohol than their parents or adults in general, and harmful drinking patterns in early life can have lifelong consequences. Thus, if there are alcoholic beverages that particularly appeal to minors and contribute disproportionately to alcohol-related harm, it is important to know this. The report aims to provide better understanding of alcoholic beverages that appeal to minors and to inform those who have responsibility for advising on alcohol policy either at country or European levels.
Alcohol and minors
In the context of this report, the term ‘minor’ is used to mean under the legal age for purchasing alcohol. This, of course, has problems in that across the European Union there is no common age for the legal purchase of alcohol, with ages ranging from 16 years to 20 years. Because there is variation in published reports, we will sometimes use differing age ranges and different terms.The consumption of alcohol by adolescents is of concern for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the brain undergoes enormous structural and development changes during adolescence, and there is evidence that alcohol is neurotoxic to the brain at this time (Anderson 2012a). It is not known whether this neurotoxicity itself explicitly impacts on educational achievement, but there is evidence that alcohol use, and in particular heavy use, can impair educational achievement, which in turn has consequences over the life course for human capital development and employment and job opportunities (Anderson 2012b). Secondly, alcohol has a differential impact on risk of death among young drinkers. In England, for example, although, in absolute terms, five times as many alcoholrelated deaths occur among 55-64 year olds than among 15-24 year olds, more than 1 in 4 of all male deaths among 15-24 year olds are caused by alcohol as opposed to less than 1 in 12 of all deaths among 55-64 year old males (Jones et al. 2009). Finally, there is evidence that the later the age at which a young person starts to drink, the less likely they are to drink heavily or be identified as dependent on alcohol later in life (Anderson 2012a).
