Dialogue: Think there's no harm in booze? Think again

BY GORDON McLAUCHLAN

When I was living in a provincial city a long time ago I went to my doctor for a check-up. He asked me about my lifestyle, taking notes. "How many cigarettes a day do you smoke?'

"Twenty," I replied.

"Thirty," he muttered as he wrote it down.

"How much do you drink in a week?'

"Let me see ... about four beers in the pub on a Friday night, and a bottle at home on a Saturday night, and sometimes a bit more than that if we go out."

"Six beers on a Friday and four to six on a Saturday," he wrote down.

"That's not what I said," I snapped.

"I know," he said looking up with a small smile. "But everyone lies about how much they smoke and drink."

"You think I'm lying to you?"

"No, not to me, to yourself."

He was right, of course. It seemed as though I smoked a packet of 20 a day but it was probably nearer 30 most days. And I drank a bit more than I said, but not much more because I couldn't afford to.

One of my great pleasures was sitting on a verandah after dinner dragging on a cigarette I'd rolled myself. My doctor was anti-smoking then when most weren't (my mother had been advised to smoke by a Dunedin GP) but I told him I rolled my own and that made it kind of like a craft. Utter baloney, of course, as he said, but desire often overcomes reason, especially when you're young.

I gave up smoking when I was in my 30s. I was a fitness faddist before it was fashionable - in fact when dogs still chased rare joggers like me and the time came when I could feel the difference it made - how it slowed me down.

On occasions over the years I've given up alcohol for short periods and still have non-alcoholic days as a kind of self-discipline (and find I sleep better, by the way). There are few financial restraints on my drinking now and I tend to have preprandial beer and then red wine. (Notice how that doctor still haunts me by making me balk at saying how much.)

But I'm very careful now because I've seen many times in my life the havoc booze can wreak not only on individuals but their families. At least four friends of my youth later drank themselves to death, and one into jail, and many of them have brought sadness to themselves and others.

Some people just can't drink, or shouldn't, but anyone who thinks alcohol is without menace is a fool. And those people who think wine is essentially different from other forms of alcohol are deluding themselves in the way I once did about rolling cigarettes.

Having said all that, let me add that I really enjoy a good beer and quality red wine and I've had hours and hours of great fun and camaraderie with a glass in my hand.

I'm absolutely certain that we laughed a lot more when there was a pub culture, and one thing I'm also sure of is that far more people are far more sensible about alcohol now than when I was young.

So when Alcohol Healthwatch blathers on about the advertising of alcohol leading to a less responsible attitude to drinking, I know that their case is lacklustre, reflexive and historically incorrect.

The alcohol consumption in New Zealand's early days was so high the figures are hard to credit, and members of my father's generation were much, much heavier drinkers than the average man today, although women probably drank less. And over the past 10 years, during which advertising has become more and more sophisticated, average individual alcohol consumption has steadily declined.

The problem with the Alcohol Healthwatch attitude is that it doesn't ring true, has the authoritative tone of over-simplification by people who think you do good by banning "bad" things, and is likely to score zero with young people.

The big, new contemporary problem surrounding the consumption of alcohol is that young kids think it's smart not so much to drink as to get drunk. If you look at television advertising, nowhere does it even hint that blitzing your brain with booze is a good thing, nor does it dissociate the pleasures of the palate or congeniality from drinking to excuse people in pursuit of oblivion.

I was brought up in a culture in which drinking was a pervasive and prevalent pastime but it did have one saving grace: getting uncontrollably drunk was seriously antisocial.

Quite what causes the modern trend among the very young that drinking is only about getting drunk I don't know, but it must come from some sense of social alienation.

Carping on about advertisements is just, well to euphemise, "whistling" into the wind.