Gordon McLauchlan: Our fascination with booze goes on and on

As i sat watching the Insight New Zealand programme the other night on the drinking age - very ably managed by Simon Dallow by the way - I was taken back to my youth when the issue of alcohol was also argued endlessly, and just as vigorously and inconsequentially.

I sat there thinking ho-bloody-hum, wondering how many thousands of hours of my life have been spent reporting on, passively listening to, or reading about how to cure the national alcohol problem. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that perceiving alcohol as a problem might be half the problem. Perhaps all this attention glorifies booze.

The latest move to stop binge drinking among young people is to raise the age, as opposed to the last move to stop binge drinking among young people which was to lower the age. And it has been like that for more than a century.

If you look back at the legislation, you see a long period of repression, during which puritans insisted the only way to eradicate the drinking problem was to eliminate drink. Unquestionably logical. Plain as the nose on your face, which is just above your gurgler.

Alas, that did not work. The Prohibitionists fought a long rearguard action until the 1970s when non-puritans decided that severe regulation had exacerbated the problem and dismantling virtually all the regulations would solve it: It's obvious, mate, plain as the cavity between your ears. And so it goes on and will go on forever, I think, Kiwis being Kiwis.

Remember when the economy was so arthritic with regulations you couldn't start a poultry farm because the result might be too many eggs, and the price of an import licence was as high as the thing you wanted to import? What was the answer? Waive all regulations: Absolutely logical, mate. Plain as the bulge in a profiteer's wallet.

It would not surprise me that if the age goes back up and binge-drinking continues, the Government may consider dropping the age to 12, stoutly arguing that kids drinking could then be supervised. Bizarre? Don't you believe it in the context of liquor legislation in this country. Managing alcohol is one of the subjects New Zealanders have never been able to discuss dispassionately.

When I was a teenager we had the same fascination with alcohol as kids do now. I can remember watching an inter-university drinking relay held, if my memory serves me, in the Royal Oak Hotel, Wellington, in conjunction with the Easter tournament. (I was there under age. Shame on me.)

THE best drinker, the anchorman of the Victoria team - the one with no apparent impediment in his throat to a straight-down swallow - was so drunk they had to help him to the bar for each event. The only thing that saved him, as it saved so many of us, was probably that they were drinking only 4 per cent beer.

Implicit in all this is a sense that, although alcohol poses complex social problems, they can all be answered by one simple idea - which means that since the first Prohibition organisation was formed in Hokianga in 1836, we, as a nation, have learned almost nothing from experience. Each generation just thinks up one-shot answers.

Those deeply experienced in the industry - and I don't mean the greedy or the fanatics at each end of the debate can't be heard for the clamour. Here are some truths.

Those who regularly binge drink have an emotional disorder. In fact, anyone who regularly drinks to find oblivion either has an allergy or is masking serious despair. Keeping them out of pubs won't fix that.

The reason binge drinking was less common when I was young is that we couldn't afford it. In fact, lack of money was a form of restriction of access that was probably more important than 6 o'clock closing. And drunkenness was forgivable only if you didn't disgrace yourself or your mates.

Drinking 5 per cent (or higher) beer from bottles reduces beer to booze. Imagine drinking wine, Scotch, brandy or gin from a bottle.

Liquor companies which sell alcopop-style drinks, designed for nothing else but for people to get drunk, have no conscience.

Glamorisation of wine sometimes fools people into thinking it's not just another form of ethyl alcohol.

The Auckland City Council is living in the never-never land if it thinks prohibiting drinking in public places will stop drunkenness as a public nuisance.

Alcohol can be a companionable friend or a deadly enemy; and if you're not careful the first can turn into the second before you know it.

Conrad Bollinger introduced his book, Grog's Own Country, with: "Most of we New Zealanders are fascinated by liquor. We either disapprove of it so strongly or enjoy it so much that it forms one of our favourite topics of conversation. Yet as an aspect of the social life and history of our country, so little is commonly known about it that much of the discussion of the subject consists of the repetition of empty catch-cries and prejudices that congealed inside us before we were out of napkins."

That was in 1959. So what's changed, mate?

* Gordon McLauchlan in an Auckland journalist and author.