Teenage girls drink more than them: “We mix alcohol with diazepam so we get high sooner” | Madrid News

“Dizziness, vomiting and in the worst cases, cardiac arrest, stroke and even death,” is the first thing Google responds when you type “alcohol and Diazepam.” However, Carla (not her real name), 15, and her friends don’t seem to give it any importance: “On special occasions, like New Year’s or the end of the school year, we mix alcohol with Diazepam so that we get high sooner,” she commented. this Thursday in the vicinity of Almansa Park, in the University City of Madrid. She and her friends started drinking approximately a year ago, coinciding with what has been reported for years by the statistics of the National Plan on Drugs, which place the age of initiation of alcohol consumption at 13.9 years. Fashions in the way young people drink almost always pursue the same objective: “Let them drink quickly so they can have fun sooner.” They had to admit Carla on one of those occasions: “I was vomiting foam,” she remembers with a laugh, and says that they drink on the weekends, which is when they go out, and specifically “vodka with lemon, because it tastes less like alcohol.”

The Samur, The municipal emergency service of Madrid has assisted 3,746 alcohol poisonings so far this year, of which 8.35% were assistance to minors. “By districts, Centro is the area with the most attention, followed by Chamberí, Moncloa-Aravaca, Carabanchel and Tetuán,” report sources from that service, who assure that 60.6% of the actions carried out during the weekend are due to alcohol poisoning. “The districts with the least interventions are Barajas, Vicálvaro and Moratalaz,” they point out. And, “by month, more interventions took place in July, followed by June and May,” this year.

Alcohol continues to be the substance that has caused the most problems for decades, as confirmed by Pablo Llama, a psychologist at Proyecto hombre in Madrid, who warns about a change in pattern among younger consumers: “Girls are drinking more and more than boys and “They have copied their model, also in the consumption of cannabis,” he says, while pointing out that they “continue to be more stigmatized and hide it much more,” so their resulting problems are more difficult to detect. “The younger they are, the lower their perception of risk and the greater their desire to experiment, and they tend to combine alcohol with other substances to get high sooner,” he explains. “They do it imitating ‘the grown-ups’, but teenagers drink like a loudspeaker, with quite high consumption that causes poisoning and, many times, addictions,” he warns. According to Llama, there have always been fashions in the ways of drinking, almost always linked to the recreational, “they can be mobile applications, or board games, but the background is always the same, the format changes but not the substance: “Do stupid with abusive behavior,” he summarizes.

The Jägerbull, also called Jägerbomb o Red Bull Blaster, A cocktail or shot made with the German herbal liqueur Jägermeister and the Austrian energy drink Red Bull, is wreaking havoc among the youngest, according to Samur sources. But also the combination indicated by Carla, of alcohol and pills. Or the one pointed out by Marina (not her real name), also 15, a fourth-year ESO student at a Madrid institute and who began consuming alcoholic beverages in 2023, when she was 14. “What many are doing is smoking joint while drinking. I have seen it a lot in a friend who really likes to do that and it gets really bad. They do it because it hits them hard. I understand that a gram costs 5 euros,” says the teenager. Others, he comments, choose not to mix, but to drink the liquor straight: “I’ve tried it, you feel like it burns your throat and it’s quite strong. Negrita hits you quickly when mixed and when you take it without anything it is worse,” he adds.

Rubén, the fictitious name of a 17-year-old from Madrid, says he started drinking when he was 13. His choice is vodka with lemon, like Carla, but he also likes Jägerbull. He says that his “trick to get drunk sooner” is to drink the drink very quickly and then smoke “a hell of a piti.” He claims he drinks to have fun. Luis (fake name) is studying his first year in Madrid and says, near his college, that his friends usually take ibuprofen: “It makes you sick, but it hits you much harder,” he says.

Hypnosedatives among students

The latest data from the Survey on Drug Use in Secondary Education of the National Drug Plancorresponding to 2023, warn of an increase in this trend of consumption of hypnosedatives among students: “When they are asked about these consumption in the last 12 months, it goes from 13.6% in 2021 to 14.8% in 2023, and in the last 30 days from 7.5% to 8.2% in the same time frame.”

Experts in addictions and youth alcoholism point out that energy drinks are increasingly adopting more infantilized formats to attract younger people, and warn that “combined with alcohol they can mask their effects and there is a greater danger that minors will continue drinking until intoxication.” ”says Begoña Brime, director of the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions of the National Plan on Drugs. The result of these excessive behaviors is seen in Madrid, over time, in the consultation of the psychologist Llama: “More and more cases are arriving (now they represent 60%) of boys and girls with dual pathologies: addictions and mental health ( anxiety, depression, eating disorders…)”.

Marina likes to go out with her group of friends, buy some bottles and play music. They don’t do it very often, especially during exam time, but when they do it it is at their friends’ houses, when their parents are not there or in some “lonely and dark” park, and with the music turned down so as not to disturb people. . “You have to be careful with what you carry and where you are going to drink because the Police may arrive,” he points out. She and her friends like to drink dark rum, which costs around 14 euros per liter in supermarkets, or gins of different colors and flavors (strawberry, mango, melon, orange, peach), which costs 17 euros. However, they usually pay more for them. “If you have an adult who trusts you, you can ask them to buy it for you or you directly go to the most hidden Chinese store and they can sell it to you (at higher prices). Some ask your age and you tell them you’re older and that’s it. It’s not easy, but if you already know that they sell it to you in that place, then you always go to the same one,” says Marina, who assures that they don’t like beer and that’s why they opt for sweet flavors. She says she usually knows how much to drink, but she has seen several of her friends overindulge in drinks, including her best friend. “Seeing her like that I reacted and took her home. “She couldn’t even put on her pajamas, she talked strange things and started crying,” he says.

Studies show a very slight decrease in consumption among young people between 14-18 years old, because “there is more and more awareness that it is harmful, it makes you fat, while there is a greater cult of body care,” says Brime. “But what is clear is that the copycat effect persists. What parents consume influences their children, the permissibility of adults determines the type of consumption of minors, which is why it is very important to talk about the risks at home,” he points out.

What Marina knows about alcohol and its consequences has been told to her by her mother, or she has found it on the Internet searching on her own. “My mother knows that I drink, but that I have never gotten drunk. He always tells me not to drink too much or to drink something that is not so strong (…) I know that it is quite dangerous to drink a lot, that it is addictive and that too much alcohol can damage your liver,” he says, while warning of that at their institute they have never been told about it.

With information from Natalia Jiménez, Álvaro Sánchez and Daniela Gutiérrez