<p>Where did I say that Europe had no drinking problems? I said it’s not as promoted as it is here because it’s not as big of a deal to drink underage.</p>
<p>That article is ridiculous. Haven’t they been drinking butterbeers since 3rd year when they were first allowed to go to Hogsmeade? I think it’s nonalcoholic. Anyways, I didn’t really see anything wrong with the movie. The only part I can even think of that dealt with drinking away your problems was with Hagrid when Aaragon died, but I didn’t even think anything of it at the time until I read the article. So it just goes to show you that it doesn’t have nearly as big of an effect on kids as they thought, if any at all. I’m sure kids see much worse on tv everyday anyways, Rock of Love anybody?</p>
<p>Maybe they need to work on how impressionable their kids are if they’re craving beer after watching Hermione take a shot. I grew up watching the Power Rangers but I can’t say that I ever got urges to wear spandex and fight middle-aged alien women.</p>
<p>^ Really? Cause I sure did. I still sometimes wake up from dreams dressed up like the green ranger. </p>
<p>I wonder why they didn’t attack the overtly sexual theme instead. </p>
<p>And as a side note, my Roman Catholic middle school also deemed Harry Potter satanic. But it was only for a short while, cause all of the parents, students, and teachers (them secretly) laughed at the administration.</p>
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<p>I didn’t say anything about Europe, but it can be easily argued and supported with statistics and studies that the UK has a worse problem with binge drinking than the US.
Check out this study: [Youth Drinking Rates and Problems: A Comparison of European Countries and the United States](<a href=“http://www.udetc.org/documents/CompareDrinkRate.pdf”>About UDETC - Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center). It is, however, a comparison of people who are not legally allowed to drink in the US to a comparison of those who, in some of the other countries, can legally drink, but the purpose of the study demands that and its focus does not seem to have been selected in order to have easily manipulated statistics. It is also a comparison of teenagers and a comparison of college-age drinkers would likely prove more useful in this discussion, as discussions of US binges often center around college drinking culture, but I cannot find one presently.
Figure 2 is about binge drinking, so it’s likely the most important in this discussion, and as it shows, only Turkey has a lower binge drinking rate among young teens, and that’s likely on account of religious reasons rather than exposure to alcohol at a young age. The UK, as you can see, has one of the highest rates, over twice that of the US.
Figure 3 shows the rate of intoxication, probably notable in this discussion as well. Some European countries do have rates lower than the US, but they account for less than a quarter of the other countries, as do those with rates about the same as the US. Again, the UK has one of the higher rates, which is again more than double that of the US.
I have no personal experience of the promotion of binge drinking in the US or otherwise, and as such a thing would likely be hard to measure, I cannot comment on it.</p>