PARIS (Reuters) - French youngsters are smoking and drinking less but are increasingly indulging in the sort of weekend drinking binges usually associated with their British counterparts, a government study showed on Tuesday.
Regular drinking of alcohol reported by those surveyed dropped between 2003 and 2005 to 18 percent from 21 percent for boys, and to 6 from 7 percent for girls, the annual Escapade study of 30,000 17 year-olds showed.
But one-in-10 teenagers asked about alcohol use in 2005 said he or she had been drunk at least 10 times in the past year -- a jump of around three percent from the 2003 findings.
The report adopted the English expression "binge drinking" to refer to youth drunkenness and said the "Anglo-Saxon" style of intense boozing was more marked among boys (55.7 percent) than girls (35.5 percent).
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Some regional officials have banned public drinking in order to counter the excessive noise and tell-tale garbage left behind after Saturday nights of youngster excess in city centres.
The report also showed that daily smoking had fallen to 32.9 percent from 37.6 percent among 17-year-olds over the two-year period, a time when new taxes on cigarette sales raised prices by around 40 percent.
Regular users of marijuana held steady over 2003-2005 at 15 percent for boys and 6 percent for girls, while those who said the they had already tried cocaine rose from to 2.5 from 1.6 percent.
