Dialogue: Band Aids won't cure alcohol ills

By GARTH GEORGE

"If alcohol were invented today," said an internationally renowned physician a few years ago, "it would be available only on prescription, and then only from hospital pharmacies."

But, he added, alcohol remained the safest, most readily available and cheapest tranquilliser known to mankind.

And therein lies the enigma of alcohol: on the one hand the cup that cheers and relaxes, the almost indispensable lubricant for social intercourse (and often sexual intercourse, too); on the other a mind-altering chemical, a brain poison and a highly addictive drug, the abuse of which is said to cost this tiny country some $2.4 billion a year.

It's a peculiar thing, alcohol, and more peculiar still is our attitude to it. It seems to always have had a mystique about it, an aura, and it is neither coincidental nor insignificant that it is known as a spirit.

In my childhood, drinking was something that adults did and it would never have occurred to my parents to share with me a glass of wine or beer, let alone spirits.

It was something that some churches proscribed absolutely and that others taught must be taken only in moderation. There were temperance societies striving to have it prohibited, and large areas of the southern South Island where I lived were kept dry by triennial licensing polls.

You had to be 21 to be legally on licensed premises, which in those days were hotels and taverns (licensed restaurants, cafes, bars, brasseries, sports grounds et al were still decades away) and there were quaint laws about having liquor near dance halls. The pubs shut at 6 pm and you couldn't get a drink on Sunday for love nor money.

If we had even hinted to our parents or teachers that we might like to have a drink or two before or at a party at home or a school ball, the very idea would have been met with astonishment.

Yet in spite of all that, by the time I was 24 I was in enough trouble with alcohol to toy with a recovery programme and by the time I was 35 I was a helpless, hopeless, degraded, humiliated, unemployed, homeless drunk.

Such, then, is the power of the spirit alcohol. But the good news is that only one person in 10 is likely to become addicted to the stuff. Most of my schoolday drinking mates soon grew out of their largely experimental excesses with booze and it never became a problem for them. It seems I drew the unlucky 10th marble.

Excessive drinking, particularly among young people, has always been with us, but as outlets have proliferated and the legal drinking age has been progressively lowered, the problem has become exponentially greater. Which is not surprising.

In fact, just before the National Government lowered the drinking age to 18, I said in this column that while I had no objection to the move, I hoped that those who promoted it would be prepared to meet the social and economic costs that would surely follow.

And follow they have, to such an extent that the Government is now considering strategies to cope - as usual years behind numerous other governments which have faced the same dilemma and which have made sensible moves, such as returning the legal age to 21 and, in France, closing tens of thousands of outlets.

I have no objection to the idea of increasing the tax on alcohol. In fact, since I pay $85-odd for a carton of 200 cigarettes, I don't see why a bottle of whisky, gin, brandy, rum or whatever shouldn't be at least the same price, considering its potential to do far greater damage. And I don't see why the reprehensible "alcopops," deliberately and deviously designed to intoxicate children, shouldn't be banned, since that was the fate of 10-packs of cigarettes when the nico-Nazis discovered that youngsters were buying them.

But if I've learned anything in my 60-odd years of living, it is that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. You can't have tens of thousands of largely unpoliced liquor outlets and a legal drinking age of 18 and not have more and more young people causing and getting into serious, sometimes fatal, trouble.

Stir into that the breakdown in family life, the upsurge in one-parent units, an economic system that forces both parents to work, the abandonment of traditional morals, ethics, virtues and values, politically correct attitudes to children's so-called "rights," and arcane liquor advertising all over television and you have a recipe for social disaster.

And all the taxes, the "education," the alcohol testing in the workplace, the ACC levy cuts for firms with approved alcohol policies, the breath-testing of drivers and the monitoring of alcohol marketing in the world will do absolutely nothing to avert it.

As usual, we're trying to treat symptoms and ignoring the cause.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz