Binge Drinking

Definitions of Binge Drinking

[Page 248]According to the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is a matter of drinking enough to have a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 grams or above; for men, on average, this can happen by having five or more drinks in a period of 2 hours, and for women this can happen by having four or more drinks in a period of 2 hours. This difference between men and women is due, in part, to the fact that women weigh less than men on average and because there are gender differences in alcohol metabolism that lead women’s BAC to increase more than men’s.

But in typical survey and interview questions about binge drinking, “2 hours” is often excluded and replaced with a more ambiguous term such as “in an evening” or “in a row,” and body size of individuals varies greatly. Thus, there is imprecision in the direct connection between binge drinking and reaching a BAC of .08. In addition, many surveys and interviews do not include the separate “four-or-more” questions; thus, it is common to include both women and men on the same measure of “five or more.” Common across most measures of binge drinking is the number of episodes in the past 2 weeks.

High-intensity drinking, sometimes called extreme binge drinking, refers to drinking 10 or even 15 or more drinks in a row (in the past 2 weeks), which can result in dangerously high BAC (.20 or higher) as well as other negative consequences. High-intensity drinking is an important consideration because it has become clear that many young people consume far more than five drinks at a time, making having more than five drinks a more normative experience for many young people (as described in the next section).

Age-Related Changes

As is true for most substance use, binge drinking tends to begin in adolescence and escalate across the transition to adulthood; it tends to peak in the early 20s and then decrease across adulthood. Based on 2014 U.S. national data from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study, binge drinking prevalence during the past 2 weeks was 4%, 13%, and 19% among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, respectively.

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