Drink campaign goes nationwide

Doug Sellman will promote the plan at 32 meetings. Photo / Christchurch Star

The head of New Zealand's National Addiction Centre, Professor Doug Sellman, will tour the country for three months in a campaign aimed at tightening controls on alcohol.

Dr Sellman, 53, a psychiatrist who has been the centre's director since it was set up at the Christchurch Medical School in 1996, says the country faced a "national alcohol crisis" fuelling violent crime, early death and three-quarters of adult weekend admissions to hospital emergency departments.

He has been granted three months' sabbatical to promote a five-point "five-plus solution" at 32 public meetings from September to November stretching from a marae at Doubtless Bay down to Invercargill.

The five points - all also raised recently by Law Commission president Sir Geoffrey Palmer - include higher taxes, raising the drinking age, restricting liquor outlets and opening hours, regulating marketing, and tighter drink-driving limits.

The tour is timed to follow an issues paper which the Law Commission is due to publish this month on New Zealand's laws and policies on the sale, supply and consumption of alcohol.

Dr Sellman said his "liquor control campaign", unveiled as part of a submission to a select committee in Christchurch yesterday, was not "an evangelical movement".

"It is simply promoting some of the best public health science available to the public of New Zealand at an historic moment with the current 'once-in-a-generation' Law Commission review," he said.

Alcohol Healthwatch director Rebecca Williams said Dr Sellman was "highly motivated by what he's seeing out there" to step outside academia and take the facts to the public.

But Hospitality Association chief executive Bruce Robertson said the "five-plus" theme was misleading because it was based on a Berl report that put the social cost of alcohol at $5.3 billion a year - a figure he said had been "discredited" by Canterbury University academics and the Treasury.

He said better solutions would be to restore the offence of being drunk in public, ban advertising of alcohol prices except actually inside liquor outlets, and ban drinking alcohol, not just buying it, under the age of 18 unless supplied by your parents.

Dr Sellman's proposal to raise alcohol taxes came on the same day the Government raised the alcohol excise by 2.8 per cent.

Both major breweries, DB and Lion, passed on other cost increases, raising beer wholesale prices by 3 per cent. Lion raised its spirits prices by 3.4 per cent and DB raised the prices of its ready-to-drink mixes by 3.2 per cent.

* The 5+ solution

1. Raise alcohol prices.

2. Raise the purchase age.

3. Reduce alcohol accessibility.

4. Reduce marketing and advertising.

5. Increase drink-driving counter-measures.

PLUS: Increase treatment opportunities for heavy drinkers.