WEEKEND attempts to characterise four drinks as a “binge” are likely to do more harm than good in the battle to reduce excessive alcohol consumption in the community.

A binge, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a drinking bout or spree”, is a term that has traditionally been taken to refer to a major intake of alcohol.

While most people would consider four drinks a night as too much of a good thing there would be few social drinkers ready to accept that four beers or wines on a Friday or Saturday night was in the same class as the “binge” they may have had after a funeral, before a wedding or in the wake of a particularly poor showing by South Sydney.

It is for this reason that new national guidelines on drinking currently being developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council need to be subject to close examination and further scrutiny.

If the government adopts guidelines that are, in the eyes of most people, patently ridiculous then they will be laughed at and ignored.

The end result of this is that an opportunity to modify public behaviour will have been wasted.

We suggest the monks apparently staffing the NHMRC need to touch base with real people in real situations.

Take, for example, the case of a couple who have chosen to go out for dinner at the end of a particularly busy week.

They share a bottle of wine over dinner followed by two liqueur coffees at the end of the night.

With a bottle of wine containing up to seven standard drinks and a generous Irish coffee frequently coming in at over the single standard drink mark they may have had as much as five standard drinks each.

This would have been consumed over, say, three hours.

To tell these people that, according to the NHMRC and the Oxford English Dictionary, they are “soaks” who have been on a “drinking bout or spree” would be to court a certain measure of disbelief.

Yes, it is important to battle binge drinking. But let’s keep the debate – and the goal posts – real.