European Alcoho... / Resources / Country Profiles / Germany
Germany
Germany is well known for its beers. About 5,000 brands of beer are produced in Germany. There are about 1,200 breweries in Germany and family breweries dominate the industry here.
A rise in alcohol abuse due to the high availability of distilled spirits in the nineteenth century led to increasing criticism of the prevailing alcohol situation, culminating in the creation of temperance associations. These groups succeeded in changing attitudes toward drinking, shaping alcoholism as an illness rather than a moral problem or vice.
Total alcohol consumption in Germany grew between the 1960s and 1985. In 1960, total consumption per capita for the whole of Germany (including GDR and FRG) was 7.3 litres. When actually reunited in 1990, the total consumption was about 12.5 litres per capita. Since then, it has decreased slightly to about 10.5 litres per capita in 2000. [1]
A 2000 national survey of about 1000 respondents aged 18 to 64 years conducted by the European Comparative Alcohol Study found the rate of abstainers to be 12% among males and 18% among females (based on the most frequently consumed beverage for each respondent). [2]
A national survey conducted in 2000 of a sample representative of the adult population aged 18-64 years found that the percentage of binge drinking occasions of all drinking occasions in the last 12 months was 14% among male drinkers and 7% among female drinkers. Binge drinking was defined as an occasion when the respondent had consumed at least one bottle of wine, 25 centilitres of spirits or four cans of beer. [3]
Youth Drinking: According to the 2001/2002 HBSC survey (total sample size = 1749), the proportion of 15-year-olds who reported ever having been drunk two or more times was 44.3% for boys and 34.4% for girls. [4]
A recent multicentre study drew the conclusion that the tendency of an earlier alcohol consumption is related to an earlier beginning of habit-forming drinking. Therefore, young people develop a problematic drinking style at an earlier age and this could lead to an increased number of severe alcoholics later.[5]
Twelve percent of all persons killed in traffic accidents in 2003 died from consequences of an accident where at least one party was under the influence of alcohol. [6]
Alcohol Policy
There are three social subsystems that the German government hopes to address with its alcohol policies. They are the legal system, including the police, legislative system and regulating authorities, the health and social system, which includes general practitioners, counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other healing professionals, and the educational system, which takes an intermediate position between the regulating and helping authorities.
The Federal Centre for Healthy Education (BZgA) was etablished on July 20, 1967 as the national prevention office in the sphere of the Federal Ministry of Health. It is concerned with social settings as well as the implementation of concrete measures and its main task is health education on the national level.
There is no licence needed for production, wholesale or retail sales of alcoholic beverages specifically, but there are laws non-specific to alcohol which affect and essentially regulate these activities. Furthermore, all beverages which contain 1.2 percent alcohol by volume have to be labelled according to the food-labelling provisions which went into effect on September 6, 1984.
The law for the protection of youth in public demands that three different kinds of alcoholic beverages are differentiated and that there are age limits on the purchase and consumption of those beverages. In the current version of this law, revised in 1985, youth under the age of 18 are generally not allowed to purchase or consume distilled spirits, beverages containing distilled spirits, or food containing more than a small amount of distilled spirits. Other alcoholic beverages may be purchased or consumed by youth aged 16 years or older.
Alcohol Advertising
Since 1970, the expenditure for alcohol advertising has clearly increased. Between 1990 and 1995, the expenditure for alcohol advertising inreased by more than 50 percent to 1.2 billion Deutschmarks in 1995.
A law for alcohol advertising has not been enacted, but there are voluntary rules of conduct of the German Advertising Standards AUthority. The rules have been drawn up by the Advertising Federation in collaboration with organisations within the alcohol industry. The general guidelines suggest that consumers aren't not "called upon to indulge in abuse or excessive consumption, nor should such consumption be trivialised or portrayed as commendable." The guidelines also demand that alcohol is not involved in scenes involving driving or sports competition, nor should it be involved in any suggestion that it promotes or increases health. [7]
[1] World Drink Trends (2002) (Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom, Productschap voor
Gedistilleerde Dranken and World Advertising Research Center Ltd).
[2] & [3] Hemström Ö, Leifman H, Ramstedt M. The ECAS survey on drinking patterns and alcoholrelated problems. In: Norström T, ed. Alcohol in postwar Europe: consumption, drinking
patterns, consequences and policy responses in 15 European countries. Stockholm, Almqvist
& Wiksell International, 2002.
[4] Currie C et al., eds. Young people's health in context. Health Behaviour in School-aged
Children (HBSC) study: international report from the 2001/2002 survey. Copenhagen, WHO
Health Policy for Children and Adolescents (HEPCA), 2004.
[5] Seifert J. The development of alcohol dependence in Germany – results from a multicentre
study. Psychiatrische Praxis, 2004, 31(2):83–89.
[6] Federal Statistic Office Germany. Road Accidents 2003. Straßenverkehrsunfälle 2003.
Kurzinformation zur Verkehrsstatistik, Alkoholunfälle im Straßenverkehr. Arbeitsunterlage.
Statistisches Bundesamt.
[7] Kraus, Ludwig, Kümmler, Petra, Jünger, Sven, Karlsson, Thomas and Österberg, Esa. "Chapter 8: Germany." Alcohol Policies in EU Member States and Norway: A Collection of Country Reports. Esa Österberg and Thomas Karlsson, Eds. 2003.
