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The young office worker has been drinking all day. Now he's dying on the carpet at my feet as his friends joke: He loves his lager; Think you can't be shocked any more by stories about binge-drink Britain? Then just read this Mail writer's harrowing dispatch.

Article Excerpt
Byline: by Laura Topham

SLUMPED on a bed unconscious, empty beer cans strewn across the carpet, the dark-haired 37-year-old looks like just another drunk. After all, it's 9pm on a Friday night and throughout Britain people just like him are drinking themselves into oblivion. The only difference is that he has stopped breathing.

His three friends dial 999 when they cannot wake him, but they have no idea just how serious it is. As Lian Withers, a first-response paramedic with the West Midlands Ambulance Service, arrives, they roll their eyes and joke: 'He loves his lager.' They don't consider passing out drunk to be remarkable or think alcohol could prove fatal to someone so young and fit.

Lian -- whose role is to reach patients in a high-speed car before an ambulance arrives -- appreciates the severity of the situation only too clearly. She rushes to start resuscitation, cutting open the man's sweater and yelling for the room to be cleared. I help her lift the man's limp body onto the floor, and pass her medical implements from her bag. She uses a device to suction alcohol and vomit from his lungs. He has swallowed it while unconscious and has suffocated.

At Lian's request, the Daily Mail photographer performs chest compressions while I monitor the horizontal line on the ECG machine that shows his heart has stopped beating.

But the man, an office worker who had spent the afternoon drinking beer and vodka with his colleagues, is beyond help.

Our futile efforts continue in silence, broken only by his friends busting into the room asking 'He's fine, isn't he?' -- to which I just shake my head. A tense 20 minutes later, the ambulance arrives and he is declared dead.

As the man lies lifeless on the floor, eyes open and vacant, his three dazed friends whisper that they'll need to contact his new wife. One thing has been made all too clear to me: death by binge drinking is a disgusting, pointless way to die.

Yet while I try to make...

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