Crate expectations: The unseen horrors of bingedrinking celebrations

Alcohol-related admissions clog up our country’s overstretched emergency departments on the first Saturday of December each year. Is it timetopermanentlyditch the unofficial celebration? André Chumko reports.

Avoidable and unnecessary. That’s what Dr John Bonning, an emergency physician who works at Waikato Hospital’s emergency department, has to say when asked about the sudden influx of drunken, stumbling, sloppy and unsophisticated patients on the first Saturday of December.

The date marks the unofficial celebration of Crate Day, held yesterday, in which participants challenge themselves to finish an entire crate of 12 beer bottles between midday and midnight.

Earlier in the week police warned people not to get “carried away”, amid concerns about a large gathering being planned at the Ashley River Gorge in Canterbury.

MediaWorks’ The Rock radio station launched Crate Day as a publicity stunt in 2009 and though it says it hasn’t promoted it since 2019, it has in the past attempted to trademark the phrase.

The alcohol content of a crate is close to a lethal dose.

While Bonning hasn’t seen anybody die yet, he has dealt with the aftermath of all sorts of other unimaginably unpleasant Crate Day-related horrors on the frontline.

Drunk patients have abused and been violent towards doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers trying to provide them with care; they’ve loudly and obnoxiously disturbed fragile and elderly patients who’ve been admitted for broken bones and pneumonia; they’ve vomited all over the floor of their cubicles. “It’s quite intimidating,” Bonning said.

They’ve been in danger of suffocating on their vomit; they’ve suffered from other toxicological aspects of alcohol and had to have their stomachs pumped; they’ve been comatose and put on intensive care ventilators.

They’ve been traumatised after drunkenly falling over, injuring themselves, or cutting themselves on broken glass bottles; they’ve fractured bones and lost significantly amounts of blood after getting into fights; they’ve seriously hurt themselves or others while drinking and driving.

These people take up valuable beds and the critical time of overburdened healthcare workers, who were increasingly frustrated at having to waste resource on the avoidable admissions.

Crate Day’s binge drinkers, generally but not exclusively young people, didn’t realise the impact their actions had on others, Bonning said. “[Please], drink responsibly. ... This is a real issue.”

Speaking on a break in between treating patients yesterday, the doctor was bracing for an inundation of drunken admissions as the afternoon turned to evening, and into the wee hours of this morning.

Bonning said that in the lead-up to Christmas, about one in every six patients admitted to EDs at night is there as the direct result of alcohol.

Andrew Galloway, the executive director of Alcohol Healthwatch, an organisation dedicated to reducing and preventing alcohol-related harm, said promotion of excessive drinking was a flagrant violation of the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act, though it was still pervasive in New Zealand.

Yesterday the Sunday Star-Times observed liquor stores advertising on social media. “Visit in store to grab yourself a crate ... Stay safe drink responsibly,” one Rotorua outlet posted on Facebook.

Galloway encouraged police, the Ministry of Health and council inspectors to take a hard line with liquor retailers.

Data shows that 40% of 18 to 24-yearolds engage in heavy drinking monthly, and Galloway said much of the targeted marketing was deliberately geared toward that demographic. Sellers slyly avoided breaches by not mentioning Crate Day in advertisements, instead simply giving more prominence to crates around early December.

This is problematic as research shows those in their formative years who engage in heavy drinking are much more likely to go on to have a hazardous or dependent relationship with alcohol.

Alcohol is widely regarded as the most harmful and most widely used psychoactive drug, ranking higher than tobacco and methamphetamine because of the huge associated number of cancers, diseases, medical disorders and conditions it’s linked to.

Advocates for responsible alcohol use or sobriety were often unfairly labelled zealots but binge drinking and Crate Day flew in the face of trying to achieve a better society, Galloway said.

While more than 80% of Kiwis use alcohol and can drink without getting into trouble, a large number of people were heavy drinkers and got into harm, accidents or assaults. This week, problem drinking has been brought into focus after Wellington’s mayor, Tory Whanau, admitted to having an alcohol problem.

While Galloway felt Crate Day was slowly becoming less socially acceptable, New Zealand still had unhelpful hangovers such as the tradition of yard glasses or encouraging people to drink 21 shots on their 21st birthdays.

He said most people could be righteous when it came to alcohol and didn’t want to confront its negative aspects in a serious way because they valued its use.

Dr Jude Ball, a University of Otago senior research fellow whose expertise includes alcohol, said there was a big decline in alcohol consumption among high school students between 2007 and 2012. But since then, drinking had remained at a fairly stable rate among students. Unfortunately it had not translated to lower drinking rates in young adults. While children were less likely to drink in school, they catch up to previous generations’ drinking levels when they reach the 18 to 24 age bracket.

That demographic was the most likely to binge-drink, but excess alcohol use wasn’t just a youth issue despite often being portrayed as one. In the 24 to 54 age group, a quarter were still likely to engage in

monthly binge drinking.

New Zealand had higher rates of binge drinking than the United States, Australia and much of Europe.

Part of that could be down to our society’s cultural links to alcohol, its visibility and its normalisation, Ball said. Despite continual expert advice recommending tightening up of drinking laws, successive governments since the 1980s had consistently deregulated alcohol.

Ball said that spoke to the power of the alcohol lobbying industry, and the perceived political unpopularity of restrictions or an alcohol tax.

She didn’t understand why alcohol advertising was not yet banned from areas such as sport.

When Ball was young, booze could not be purchased from supermarkets and the drinking age was 21.

But she says the latter wasn’t enforced at all then, and it was positive the law was mostly imposed now.