KEY POINTS:
New Zealand has cut back on its smoking and drinking - but we are yet to forsake our carousing ways with the bottle.
Tobacco smoking and alcohol intake in New Zealand are slightly less than average for developed nations.
We also drink less than Australians but we smoke significantly more than them, the latest health comparisons from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show.
Luxembourg and Ireland are the biggest-drinking nations, people aged 15 and over each consuming more than 13 litres of alcohol on average each year.
In 2005, New Zealanders drank 9.4 litres, which was 20 per cent less than in 1980, a reduction even greater than the OECD average of 15 per cent.
Researchers estimate alcohol causes more than 1000 New Zealand deaths a year, half from injuries, including car crashes, a quarter from cancer; and that alcohol prevents almost as many deaths, mainly from heart disease and stroke in the elderly.
Alcohol Advisory Council chief executive Gerard Vaughan said yesterday that despite declining average intake, New Zealand's liquor problem remained our binge drinking.
Public understanding of the harms of bingeing had broadened, indicating some success in the council's four- to five-year-old culture-change campaign, but that had not yet translated into drinking less in a session.
"It's early days yet," he said.
"It took a couple of hundred years to develop our problem-drinking culture, since the first whalers came here."
Tobacco smoking prevalence, like alcohol consumption, has declined dramatically in many developed countries - including New Zealand, but the rate here has stalled for several years at just under one in four adults, leading smokefree campaigners to seek new solutions.
Like many health statistics, the national smoking rate hides big ethnic, gender and socioeconomic variations: Maori women have the highest rate, at 50 per cent, and Asian women the lowest, 4.7 per cent.
Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in New Zealand, killing an estimated 5000 people a year, the Health Ministry says.
For the half of all smokers who die prematurely from the habit, they lose 23 years of life on average. Around a fifth of cancer deaths are from smoking.
The next big change in tobacco control, following the introduction of large pictorial warnings on tobacco and cigarette packs next month, could be a ban of tobacco displays in shops.
The ministry wants submissions on proposals ranging from greater enforcement of the existing restrictions, through to an outright ban.
Research presented to an Auckland conference last year showed that many smokers who were trying to quit bought a pack of cigarettes on impulse after seeing a retail display.
Banning retail displays has significant public support and is top of the wish-list for tobacco-control groups, which aim to end smoking in New Zealand within 10 years.
But the campaigners have also accepted the need for "harm-reduction" methods - devices that deliver nicotine in safer ways than with tobacco smoke. These include the "e-cigarette" nicotine vaporiser, about to be tested by Auckland University, and oral "snus" tobacco pouches.
"The Smokefree Coalition doesn't have a policy on snus or e-cigarettes," said coalition director Mark Peck, "but we believe safer nicotine delivery systems need to be investigated."
