Dialogue: User-pays answers to health problems

By GARTH GEORGE

More teenagers are drinking more booze than ever, and many are drinking themselves regularly into drunkenness.

More teenage girls are smoking than ever, in spite of decades of tut-tutting and proscriptions by the smoking police.

Teenage girls are selling their bodies on the streets of Auckland, and more women are aborting unplanned pregnancies than ever, in spite of the decades-long tut-tutting and other antics of the pregnancy police.

Are you surprised? No? Well, I'm not either.

Long before a Government not known for its intelligence decided, apparently for no reason at all, to lower the drinking age to 18, I predicted that such a course would generate greatly increased social problems among our youth - as if they didn't have enough already.

I did that with confidence because I know that a number of American states dropped their legal drinking ages to 18, then very quickly raised them again because of the frightful damage teenage drunkenness was causing in their communities.

But our politicians have never been ones to take notice of trends overseas, which helps to explain an awful lot of legislative stupidity over the years. You'd think they would inform themselves properly before making decisions.

The problem of teenage drinking is only just starting. In years to come, we will reap the whirlwind of a lower drinking age when many of those who overindulge in alcohol in their teens will find themselves hooked on the stuff as adults.

Take it from one who knows, one who was seriously addicted by his early 20s and who was a hopeless, dead-man- walking alcoholic at 35, penniless, homeless, unemployable, alone and probably certifiably insane.

But I've never managed to quit smoking and, being a smoker, I have known for years that the smoking police, particularly when it comes to young people, have been pretty much wasting their time and our money.

On Tuesday, the Government raised the price of a packet of smokes by $1, which means my smoking bill jumps by nearly $10 a week. The excuse is that a higher price will cause more smokers to quit; the reason is that the Government is, as always, short of cash and wants to raise an extra $110 million a year in taxes that won't offend most people, because most people don't smoke.

But I'm willing to bet that it will make as much difference to the number of smokers, and particularly young people, as the ugly, fatuous warnings lately attached to once-attractive cigarette packets - zilch.

However, if the Government were prepared to make some of that $110 million available to subsidise quit- smoking therapies, people like me might give the matter a second thought.

It has always seemed odd that, while dozens of preventive health measures are heavily subsidised by the health vote, help for smokers never has been. It's odd because for decades now smoking has been presented as the biggest, nastiest and costliest health ogre of the age. (It's not, of course: it just makes an easy target.)

I resent having to pay nearly as much a week as I spend on smokes for a course of stop-smoking treatment. But governments have never been prepared to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to smoking, and it looks like this one is no different.

So with dearer smokes and more freely available booze, I guess more and more schoolgirls can be expected to take to the streets to pay for their nicotine and alcohol. Others will find that, under the influence of liquor, their pants come down only fractionally slower than their inhibitions are lowered.

And that must, as a matter of course, lead to more unwanted pregnancies and a bigger demand on our heavily state-subsidised abortion services.

So it seems to me that if raising the price of cigarettes and tobacco will reduce the health problems caused by smoking, putting an extra dollar on every glass of beer and nip of spirits will have the same effect on the health problems caused by drinking.

And if the Government made women pay the full cost of abortions, that would surely have a salutary effect on the ever-increasing rate of unwanted pregnancies.

What could be simpler?

* garth_george@herald.co.nz