Melbourne, April 25: Australian teenage girls are skolling straight vodka in a new form of the spin-the-bottle game to get drunk quickly.

Girls, as young as 15, are also trying to be at par with men as they take part in the straight drinking, that landed almost 1700 kids in NSW hospitals for alcohol poisoning last year.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the game was popular in the states including NSW, Queensland and Victoria, where girls, in place of spinning the bottle and kissing the person it points to, were guzzling huge amount of alcohol.

Paul Dillon, director, Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia, said an alarming abuse of vodka was making its round.

"There is a phenomenal (abuse) of vodka. Girls are drinking it, wrongly believing it contains no calories, that because it is clear it is better than other spirits and because it''s odourless," News. com. au quoted him as saying.

"Girls are not using mixers because of the calories and so they are drinking the spirits straight. They are getting the taste for spirits through alcopops and then leaping into the straight spirits," he added.

St Vincent''s Hospital emergency director Dr Gordian Fulde added: "Teenage girls have been playing all the games that boys have been playing - like boat races.

"They do it early in the night in preparation for a big night out. It''s been going on for a while but is increasing and very much becoming part of the night."

Pals Hannah Gray, Stephanie Pulis, Karina Veling and Laura Bon Accorso, all 18-year-olds, revealed there were younger kids spinning the bottle to speed their way under influence.

Veling said: "I''ve heard about it. I''ve never played it though. I reckon the younger you are the more things you drink straight - the quicker to get drunk. We are all wusses, we didn''t drink under-age." (ANI)