ALCOHOLISM is on the rise among young people in Bournemouth, according to a youth worker.

The problem of underage binge drinking is getting worse and in a few cases some teenagers have developed alcohol addiction.

Yesterday Gordon Brown lent his support to a campaign to crack down on the sales of alcohol to underage drinkers. The government is promising a "co-ordinated" approach to tackling young people's binge drinking.

Nationally 13 children a day are taken to hospital suffering from the ill effects of alcohol misuse and in Bournemouth youth workers regularly call parents, or in some cases an ambulance, for young people who have drunk too much.

Senior youth worker Adrian Griffiths said: "Drinking is more of a problem than drugs in some ways."

He knows one 16-year-old boy who drinks two bottles of spirits a day.

Mr Griffiths said: "He starts at about 1pm and is fighting by 11pm when I see him.

"To build up that kind of tolerance he must have been drinking since he was 11 or 12 years old."

He believes the problem of young people drinking has been exacerbated by the availability of alcohol 24 hours a day.

Mr Griffiths, 40, from Southbourne deals with hundreds of teenagers on the streets of Bournemouth every year, the majority aged between 14 and 17.

He was keen to stress that not all young people binge drink and that often it may be just a few members of a group.

Beer is the drink of choice for boys and girls tend to drink vodka.

Mr Griffiths said: "Young people do not make alcohol, it is adults who supply it to children and it is they who are breaking the law."

He supports the council's recent efforts to take away alcohol licences from premises which repeatedly were found to be selling booze to youngsters.

But young people are still able to buy alcohol in some shops, others are given it by parents, some steal it from supermarkets and a few years ago people could buy it from bootleggers.

Mr Griffiths said: "When the parents discover their children have been drinking they are usually horrified. Typically we have the crying mum, the angry dad and the laughing younger sister. Most of the parents do care but there are some that don't and the response we get is what do you want me to do about it'. Some parents are in need of parenting themselves.

"When young people are drunk we try and educate their friends about how to look after them."