French city has taken drastic action to tackle the growing problem of “le binge drinking”.
RENNES: A French city has taken drastic action to tackle the growing problem of “le binge drinking”. The city council in Rennes, the capital of Brittany renowned for its boisterous student life, has begun buying up bars in order to close them down.
“We wanted to reduce the concentration of bars in the city centre as part of a general policy to reduce excessive drinking in Rennes,” said Honore Puil, the city councillor in charge of tackling binge drinking. So far his unit has bought two bars, both in the cobbled Rue Saint Michel in the historic city centre — also known as “Rue de la Soif”, or street of thirst.
“It is still very much an active policy and we plan to continue with it,” said Puil. Rue Saint Michel is a magnet for students from the city’s two main universities.
They can be seen downing lagers out on the pavements most nights.
French doctors warned last month that the country was beginning to adopt the British taste for heavy drinking, with young people fast developing an appetite for the copious consumption of alcohol.
Brittany has always been ahead of that trend, long holding a reputation as the region with the heaviest drinkers.
A map of France published yesterday by the newspaper Le Figaro to illustrate a new government plan to cut drink-driving deaths showed a dark swathe along the Breton coast, where fatal accidents related to alcohol were highest.
In 2005 nearly half of all 17-year-olds in Britanny had been seriously drunk at least three times in a year, according to one study. This compared with a national average for the same age group of only 26 per cent.
In 2006, more than 6,500 people were arrested for public drunkenness in Brittany, the highest figure in France.
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