Finnish teens drink less often than most of their European age-mates -- but when young Finns drink, they tend to drink a lot more at a time.
That is according to figures released on Thursday by ESPAD – the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs. Local research was carried out by the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).
Finnish youngsters differ from those in most other European countries in that they usually drink specifically with the aim of becoming drunk, the data shows.
“The most striking difference is that Finnish students reported a considerably larger amount of alcohol consumed on the latest drinking day (7.5 versus 5.1 centilitres of pure alcohol). Hence, Finnish students appear to use alcohol less often but in larger quantities than the ESPAD average,” the report says.
The latest figures indicate that teenage girls in Finland get drunk more often than boys of the same age.
Drug abuse less common
Fewer Finnish students reported using cannabis than the European average, with 11 percent saying they had used it, compared with the overall average of 17 percent. Finnish youth were half as likely as Europeans in general to have tried other illicit drugs (three percent versus six percent).
This weekend, Finnish police plan stepped-up monitoring of underage drinking, as schools let out for the summer on Saturday.
