The author, Professor Doug Sellman, is the director of the National Addiction Centre in Otago.
If you haven't read the piece, or couldn't be bothered clicking on the link above, let me summarize:
Professor Sellman is making the case that alcohol consumption, particularly in young people, is high (no pun) in New Zealand for the following reasons:
- Alcohol is too easily obtained, and is sold at a "discounted rate". Raising prices and limiting the places where alcohol can be purchased is the first step to stemming the tidal wave of boozehounds.
- The alcohol / tobacco industries are targeting younger viewers with images of drinking and smoking in an effort to raise up little addicts, increasing their greedy fat-cat profits. By following the path adopted by the French, known as "Loi Evin", whereby no advertisements for alcohol or tobacco are allowed on television, radio and cinema, we can guarantee our youth are not exposed to the lurid imagery of tippling. Alcohol sponsorship of cultural and sporting events should be banned, and marketing targeted towards young people should be out-and-out prohibited.
- The government is in bed with these alcohol-pushing sleaze-merchants and we need to send a strong signal to them to create legislation to protect our society, our children and our future.
Now before I get started, I want to point out that while I was reading this article online, I notice that the ad placed next to this op-ed was a banner for Absolut Vodka. (take a look!)
Let's take a moment to laugh hysterically at the irony of this. The ad targeting system for the site probably read the words "Alcohol" on the page and put in a booze ad. That's awesome.
Now let me address Prof. Sellman's arguments.
Let's start from the top and work our way down, shall we?
First and foremost: Alcohol is sold at a discounted rate in NZ? I'm the guy writing this and I can't believe what I'm reading. DISCOUNTED RATE?! In comparison to where, exactly? United Arabs Emirate? An alcoholics anonymous meeting? Perhaps Prof. Sellman thinks $16 is reasonable for a 6-pack of decent beer, but for the rest of the earth, this is a travesty, an abomination that insults the very nature of beer. Beer is just fermented wheat juice, right? They don't put in gold flecks or anything? I did some quick lookups around the globe for average beer prices. Here's a rough idea for westernized countries.
NZ 6 pack of Monteith's $15.99 NZ
US 6 pack of Sierra Nevada $8.99 US
UK 6 pack of Guiness £12.99
CAN 6 pack of Lakeport $14.00 CAN
Norway 6 pack of anything £24.00
Yes, there are countries more booze-pricey than NZ, but all-in-all, $15.99 is pretty damn high by most people's standards.
Now of course the first thing out of everyone's mouth is the obvious "But you have to factor in the exchange rate", which of course is nonsense. Exchange rates are important to currency brokers and tourists. Nobody else cares. When you live in a place, you earn that money and you spend that money. It does you no good living in London to hear "You know, you might earn jack shit here, but if you were in Waziristan, this would be great money!" What we're talking about here is a relative scale of money earned to it's spending power in your nation. Dollar for dollar (pound for pound, euro for euro), booze is expensive here. Ironically, the places where it's more expensive tend to be the countries which have adopted the "Loi Evin" strategy. Huh. Go figure.
As for the second point, that booze is all prevalent...
Again, where is this man living? Does he have an apartment inside the Mill or a Liquorland? Alcohol is not ridiculously easy to get here. By the way he tells it, it's lying around in piles for anyone to collect at their whim. Yes, there are bottle shops. Yes, you can get beer and wine in the supermarket. There are even a handful of dairies which sell the dreaded devil's brew (insert collective gasps of shock here). Is this the prevalence to which he's referring? The regular places human beings buy alcohol? Next thing you know, they'll be serving the stuff in restaurants, offering it in pubs! What next, I ask you!
When I first arrived on the fair shores of NZ, you'd have been lucky to find a dairy which sold beer or wine. Forget about spirits. For those you have to drag your sorry ass to a bottle shop and pay through the nose just to look through the glass cabinet. Luckily in recent times you can actually pop into a dairy and get a bottle for something slightly less than a week's salary. The beer section of most dairies has an armed guard. And we're not talking about ALL dairies. We're talking some, maybe 40%. The number really isn't that high, and it looks like even these might be on the chop:
In America you can buy beer nearly anywhere, as you can in the UK and most of Europe. Wine as well. Hard alcohol can be purchased in most stores which sell food or petrol, including the 7-11 chain. No one bats an eye at it. Yes, we have alcoholics in America. Yes there is binge drinking in Australia and Canada and lots of other nations. Yet alcohol consumption per capita is still higher in NZ than in the US, Canada, Australia, and a large swathe of other countries.
Is it access to booze causing this? Hardly. Unless you're hosing people down with it on their way home after work, the ability to buy liquor doesn't mean people are going to buy it. People buy the alcohol because they want it. I can stock the shelves of every store in this country with jars of putrid fish heads; it doesn't mean people will stop and say "Oooh, look dear. Putrid fish heads. I need to get some because I can and they're here."
As to the conspiracy theory portion of the op-ed proclaiming that the evil liquor industry is targeting young consumers with their wicked, misleading ads like some corporate pedophile with a liquor-laced candy treat is spurious at best.
I am the first to say corporations need to shoulder some responsibility, but stop and think a moment: when you were a teenager, did you drink because of ads? I didn't. I drank because my friends drank. I drank because I wanted to be more adult. Because I liked getting buzzed. Because I wanted to get in some girl's pants. I drank because it was a right of passage, a stage between being a young adult and actually being an adult. I'm not saying it's right or it's fair or it's okay. I'm saying it's a fact. Deal with it.
Much behaviour around drinking circles back, unfortunately, on the older generation, the teenager's parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, teachers and so on. Talk all you want about the evils of drinking and smoking, but as far as I'm concerned it's monkey see monkey do. All the evil corporate ads in the world never would have gotten teenage me to eat brussel sprouts, but when I saw adults partying it up and having a hoot of a time, shit. Looked like fun. Might as well join in, just without the dull adults to bore the whole thing to tears. Plus I really, really want to get in that girl's pants.
If we're looking to place some blame, take a stroll down Courtney Place in Wellington or Ponsonby in Auckland on a Saturday night. You can't throw a bent bottlecap without nailing a gaggle of men or women out on the major piss and making no bones about it. It's not about socializing, or dinner with friends, or dancing the night away. These are the punctuation marks in the evening. Booze is the reason, plain and simple. It is the alpha and the omega. Go out, get loaded, stumble around, make out with strangers, stumble home. All the parental speeches and legislation in the world aren't going to undo that damage. Kids aren't blind: they see you and your friends whacked on wowwy sauce weekend after weekend, they figure it's cool, or at the very least they can lord it over you when you try to whip out the morality speech.
I'm not trying to judge here. I'm a libertarian at heart when it comes to personal behaviours and consumptions. You don't hurt me or anyone else, do what you want. Sex, drugs, booze. That is the whole point of being an adult: you lose the freedoms of childhood, so you might as well get the cheap thrills of adulthood. But we need to face facts here: you stumble around every friday / saturday night with your mates bumbling hammered, and do you figure your kids aren't going to follow suit?
The people of New Zealand are reasonable, intelligent people (no one mention Palmerston North!). Nobody would mind banning booze ads in movies or on TV. We ignore them anyway unless there's partial nudity involved. But if the government even thinks of banning sponsorship and sales of piss at the rugby, Prof. Sellman better get his ass into protective custody. If it goes down like that there will be a queue of furious drinkers as long as the South Island ready to kick his sorry ass clear to Antarctica.
Finally, are we really going to take another pointless journey down legislation lane? With very few exceptions, attempting to legislate bad habits out of people has invariably ended in failure. More laws and higher taxes always sound prudent when spoken with authority, but don't be fooled. The problem of binge drinking can't be dissolved with the solvent of legalities. People don't drink too much just because it's legal. People don't stop drinking because it's more expensive or more prohibited. People in Saudi Arabia travel hundreds of miles to other countries so they can have a beer, for crying out loud. Prohibition only leads to more drinking.
New Zealand has plenty of laws around drinking, plenty of taxes for beer and wine and spirits. People who imagine even more will some how quell peoples' urges or counter their behaviours are sadly mistaken.
God, after all that, I need a drink.
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