Alcohol poisoning up 350% in NL

5300 people ended up in the emergency room last year, with alcohol poisoning. In 2012, the number of drinkers who got alcohol poisoning, or 'coma-drinkers' stayed the same, it seems from figures out of consumer organization VeiligheidNL (SafetyNL). In that year, around 5300 people were in hospital for alcohol poisoning-related reasons. This is three times as many compared to 2003, when the numbers were around 1500. By far the most regular patients are men (63 percent) and those under 24 (60 percent). In the group up to 14-year olds, girls are in the majority. Last year, pediatricians reported that the number of coma-drinkers actually went down. One of the researchers still called the number of under-18's with alcohol poisoning "scarily high." VeiligheidNL also estimates a figure of 15,000 people that ended up in hospital in 2012 after binge drinking. In most of these cases, they were brought in for accidents where alcohol was in play. The organization believes that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that there were actually more hospital visits that went unrecorded. This is because the emergency unit doesn't enforce a standard recording to see if alcohol was ingested before the accident.