Dialogue: No, the politicians don't know best

By GARTH GEORGE

The chickens hatched by the out-of-the-blue political decision to drop the drinking age to 18 are coming home to roost a little over two years later - just as this column predicted a month or so before the legislation was passed.

The number of teenagers aged 18 and 19 so drunk they have to be treated at Auckland Hospital has jumped 50 per cent and there is a huge increase in the number of treatments required by highly intoxicated 16- and 17-year-olds.

Who's surprised? As I wrote in June 1999: "When you lower the drinking age you tacitly condone adolescent alcoholism and its associated problems. You send the wrong signal to a group that doesn't have the maturity to make sensible calls about alcohol intake."

How true that has turned out to be. After all, at the time our politicians made their decision - and I still haven't figured out why all of a sudden they bothered - there was ample evidence against the move from similar experiments in Victoria, Australia, a number of Canadian provinces and several American states.

All of them had lowered the drinking age to 18, been faced with a huge increase in teenage booze problems, then quickly raised it again.

And there was considerable protest from experts in the field of alcohol-related diseases and social problems, many of them employed and paid by the Government.

It seems to me that it was just another example of one of the most dangerous ideas to have entered our society in the past couple of decades: That politicians should lead public opinion rather than respond to it. Ever since the economic and social upheavals of the mid-1980s there has been a growing tendency for politicians to act as if "we know best" is their principal dictum.

National under Jenny Shipley had plenty of them (remember her pathetic attempt at imposing a Code of Social Responsibility?) and it was National that initiated and forced through the lowering of the drinking age.

Labour, the Alliance and the Greens, whose socialistic dogmas have always favoured social engineering and to whom "we know best" is a mantra, have kept it up, messing about, for instance, with relationship property and paid parental leave.

But the breweries, too, have to take their share of the blame. They have wooed young drinkers not only with their arcane alcohol advertising, particularly on television, but with a whole new raft of products known as alco-pops which taste innocently like soft drink but intoxicate most readily.

It is significant, too, that the production and promotion of these dangerous products coincided with the legislation lowering the drinking age.

I have said it before and I say it again: alongside the depredations of alcohol in our society, smoking can be seen as a healthy pastime. I wonder, for instance, to what extent the lowered drinking age has contributed to our youth suicide rate.

Why is it that this dangerous substance, even more lethal than tobacco, can still be advertised when tobacco advertising has been proscribed for years? Some of the advertising for beer and for alco-pops is reprehensible, inhumanly aimed as it is at young men who want to be seen as macho and at young women who want to be seen as sexy.

Advertising of alcoholic beverages should be banned altogether. That should include billboards and all the point-of-sale stuff plastered all over hotels, taverns, bistros, brasseries, cafes and sports clubs, and a total proscription on the sponsorship of sporting events by the pedlars of alcohol.

And why are the products of the booze barons not required to carry warning labels on the bottles as cigarette packets have been required to do for years?

Such as: Alcohol can kill you. Alcohol is a mind-altering chemical. Alcohol is a brain poison. Alcohol is an addictive drug. Alcohol during pregnancy can damage your baby. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and makes you vulnerable. Alcohol can cause you to stop breathing. Alcohol can stop your heart. Alcohol causes road accidents. Alcohol can drive you to suicide.

And why not increase the taxation of alcohol every six months as is done with tobacco? Since I pay $85-odd for a carton of 200 cigarettes, I don't see why a bottle of whisky, gin, brandy or rum or a carton of beer shouldn't be at least the same price, considering its potential for far greater harm.

I just hope that Justice Minister Phil Goff - one of the less intellectual and, therefore, more intelligent of those who manipulate the levers of power - has the wit to make a start by listening to the real experts and lifting the legal drinking age back to 20.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz