ALLCOOL is a project where a consortium of research and collaborating stakeholders in 3 South European countries (Portugal, Spain and Italy) aim to tackle the growing trend of Heavy Episodic Drinking (HED) in the region. More research is needed to analyse the relationship between HED and lower socio-economic youth and young adults (15-30 years old). This is particularly relevant in Southern European countries going through a socioeconomic crisis, with increasing unemployment rates especially among recently graduated students and decreasing family income. By promoting healthy lifestyles, filling research gaps and implementing innovative and replicable local interventions focusing on prevention of heavy episodic drinking among youth this project will: 1) promote good health among EU youth population; 2) in the long-term, contribute to the sustainability of the health systems and healthy work forces.
To achieve this, this project intends to conduct research at the local level (WP4) that will be later compared in order to understand the local, national and south European similarities of drinking patterns, context and policy. The research results will be crucial for the development of local interventions, and produce the necessary knowledge about HED in Southern Europe, especially among low-income and unemployed young adults. This project expects also to empower and raise awareness about binge HED, especially among low-income groups, both on a local and European level. This will be done through the creation of 3 local consultative forums, the production and dissemination of local, national and European recommendations to inform comprehensive HED policy measures, in line with WHO Global Strategy to reduce harmful use of alcohol (WP25. Intervention pilots will also be implemented on a local level, in order to design and experiment adapted and effective approaches to intervene on HED, especially among low income youth and unemployed graduated young adults (WP6).
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The Elisad gateway project aims to further develop and implement the methodological framework and web-based technologies in order to improve cross-European data transfer in the field of alcohol, drugs and addictions. The overall project objective is to successively develop and update a quality-revised web portal to drug- and addiction-related websites which is able to provide both: a subject-oriented retrieval system, and information about the content and publisher of each included site within an online catalogue.
After completion of the 2002-2003 work programe, the online catalogue available at www.elisad.uni-bremen.de offers searching and thematic browsing in 12 subjects. It includes recorded information, published and catalogued by 88% from Western EU countries, indicating the problems to access information especially from Central and Eastern Europe only weakly represented within 12% of the registered web resources on AOD.

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The STAD in Europe (SiE) project aims to tackle heavy episodic drinking by restricting the availability of alcohol in all drinking environments: licensed drinking environments, public environments and private environments. One of the most successful prevention strategies targeting binge drinking is STAD, developed in Stockholm, Sweden. The main components of STAD are community mobilization, a training course in responsible beverage service, and stricter enforcements. It is one of the few community action programme’s that has shown significant effects on the reduction of overserving of alcohol, underage drinking in city areas, and the reduction of alcohol-related aggression. STAD has even proven to be very cost-effective. Moreover, an approach based on environmental interventions is expected to be especially effective for lower socio-economic classes. In this project we would like to combine the knowledge gained in Sweden with complementary elements to come to an integral European approach for reducing availability of alcohol for young people. We think that every country and (drinking)culture will need a tailored approach but we also feel that the effective elements as were present in the STAD programme could be universally applicable. In 7 countries, 7 tailored STAD-based interventions will be developed (either focusing on nightlife, events, home-drinking or drinking in parks and streets) and implemented. Both the process and the outcomes will be researched and registered. The project will result in an intervention manual applicable to all EU MS and a final symposium on tackling binge drinking in Europe. All European countries and regions will be facilitated to implement strategies for reducing alcohol availability that have the potential to reduce alcohol related problems in a substantial way.
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The overall aim of the project is to prevent harm done to children and adolescents caused by the alcohol problems of their parents, with special attention given to health inequalities as one serious consequence for children affected by parental alcohol problems (ChAPAPs).
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Results of comprehensive monitoring of alcohol marketing will allow the European Commission and the Member States to formulate advices in order to improve the existing regulations of alcohol marketing on MS and EU level. The objective is to improve these regulations in terms of content and process given different national circumstances.
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