British children are among the highest users of tobacco, alcohol and drugs in Europe, but the current approach to teaching them about the dangers is not working. That's the view of the government's own advisors, who now say drugs and alcohol education has little if any impact on children's future behaviour. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs believes a better approach will be to ban alcohol advertising on television, raise the smoking age to 18 and lower the drink-drive limit. Our social affairs correspondent Victoria Macdonald reports.

Dirty Pretty Things, that's the name of the band signing the autographs at Carling Lager (a beer's brand), sponsors of the Reading and Leeds music festivals, but in today's report by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, those cans of Lager would disappear as would all alcohol industry sponsorship for venues and events attracting young people. That's one of the proposals aimed at dealing with what the authors portray as a nation of binge drinking, cigarette puffing, drug taking, hedonistic youth.

If you sum up the damages to their health and to, er, things like, you know, social cohesion, jumps of violence and, and so on. Ah, and if you look at the prospects for them in the future, when they're heavy drinkers, lifelong drinkers, when they are smoking, then the damage to society as a whole, caused by these drugs is immense and the time has come for us to really take overall stock and to do things to reverse this trend.

The authors of today's report have divided it firstly into the problems. Of the nearly 7 million 16 to 24 -year-olds in the UK, nearly 30% drink more than twice the recommended daily alcohol limit at least once a week, almost a third are daily smokers and one million have used an illegal drug in the past month. The second part of the report is the solutions.

Reduce the maximum legal blood alcohol level from 80 milligrams to 50 milligrams per milliliter, ban alcohol advertising on television and in most cinemas, raise the excise duty on alcohol, raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18, and do more to control the supply of illegal drugs.

While the government is minded to change the rules on buying cigarettes, it rejects reducing the drink-drive limit.

We aren't in favor of ah, of changing the rules on, on drink-drive at the moment, what matters is very tough enforcement and tough penalties, and by international standards we are very good at both of those in England. The report also stresses the importance of tobacco misuse and we're consulting at the moment on raising the legal age for tobacco sales from 16 to 18.

Greg, we are gonna get some pills for the weekend, you're in?

It's a decision time.

The government's Frank anti-drugs ads. But the report says drug education programs on the whole had little if any impact on children's future drug use.

Talk to Frank.

Taking the lure off the alcohol industry from whika to wine, from ale to alcopops, the authors say the government is not doing enough to enforce the voluntary codes. The industry insists it can monitor itself.

The 18 to 24 age group is a very important age group as far as drinks companies are concerned. You will have a lot of, ah, relatively heavy drinking going on within this age group, ah, but the alcohol, ah, rules actually prevent people even under the age of 25 being shown in advertising. Ah, as a sort of buffer to ensure that advertising doesn't appeal to under 18s.

In Scotland, the smoking ban has been hailed as a success and Channel 4 News has learned that the Scottish Executive is now turning its sights to alcohol, looking at enforcing restrictions on such things as sales in the supermarkets, the report's authors hope, is that this trend would spread across the border.

venue
A place for large gatherings, as a sports stadium.
會場大型集會的地點，如體育館
puff
To take puffs on smoking material:
吸煙從吸煙類物品中吸或呼
hedonistic
快樂主義者的
cohesion
The act, process, or condition of cohering 內聚性
whika
a mixture of vodka and whisky
ale
淡色啤酒(較一般啤酒含更多的酒精)
alcopop
a term coined by the popular media to describe bottled alcoholic beverages that resemble drinks such as soft drinks and lemonade
buffer
Something that lessens or absorbs the shock of an impact.
緩沖器可以減輕或吸收沖擊的震動的東西