Go to http://www.nhs.uk/LiveWell/Alcohol/Pages/Alcoholhome.aspx for the facts and some pretty hard-nosed advice.  Frequent binge drinking will expose you to all sorts of risks, for example:-

• Physical danger while drunk – the hospitals are full of drink-related accidents
• Alcoholism – an addiction that will take over your life and effectively destroy any chance of real happiness
• Cirrhosis of the liver and early death – an alarming tendency in young people today

And it is all so demeaning!  Do we really think that being a drunken slob is clever, attractive, nice, sensible?  Of course not.  But on the other hand, people especially young people, like the uninhibited effects of tipsiness.  How do we strike the right balance?  One of the main things is Being Happy.  If we are generally optimistic and light-hearted there is far less need for alcohol to remove inhibitions.  Apart from that there is simple common sense.  Being aware of when you’re losing control and then stopping.

So how much should you / can you drink?  Most people will advise that infrequent moderate drinking is pretty harmless.  Some doctors even go so far as to say that a glass of red wine a day is beneficial to the heart.  And we won’t disagree with that but there are two little alarm bells to consider:-

• The red wine effect is far from universally agreed.  A book – The Wine Diet by Roger Corder – explains that indeed SOME red wines can help stave off heart disease and that they are often the robust (ie slightly unpleasant) tasting ones.  But that the same benefits can be achieved with cranberry juice or several other non-alcoholic foods and drinks.
• And the BMA’s advice when asked to set a safe limit is that the only totally safe limit is NIL.  There is no medical evidence that alcohol, being a poison, can be anything other than harmful.