Busting the binge

Last week's landmark Law Commission report into liquor laws has triggered a fresh round of debate and hand-wringing over the country's drinking culture. GEOFF COLLETT talked with Nelsonians at different points on the front line in that debate for their assessments of the place of alcohol in Nelson.

How does Nelson do a bender? Much like anywhere else in New Zealand, by all accounts: like clockwork, same time, same place, same way, a couple of times a week.

Build up a thirst until the weekend rolls around. Stock up at the off-licence. Go to a party, someone's flat, hang out in cars. Drink quickly, copiously and cheaply. Around midnight, head into Bridge St for a top-up. Mill around in the street once the bars close at 3am. Give up on trying to catch a taxi, stumble home, hopefully avoiding the cruising thugs looking for easy prey and trying not to do anything dick-headed that will attract the attention of the police.

A few won't make it. A handful more in a bad weekend will end up battered or comatose in the emergency department at Nelson Hospital. Just about everybody else will do it again next week.

Of course, that's a sweeping generalisation of a far more multi-faceted reality, but like all stereotypes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the real thing, as those who deal with it and its aftermath week in, week out will tell you.

Bridge St publican Ron Taylor he owns the Rock Bar nightclub and is vice-president of the local Hospitality Association wants it said loudly and clearly that the vast majority of New Zealand drinkers enjoy their liquor without any problems. They drink happily in clubs, pubs and restaurants or at home, with nothing worse than a hangover to show for it. He no doubt has a point.

He's on solid ground, too, when he argues that bars are the safe places for drinking to take place. The police back him up.

"It would be fair to say that generally, we're reasonably happy with the way almost all licensed premises are conducting themselves," says Inspector Brian McGurk, the police's Nelson Bays area commander. "We're finding that they are well managed, the staff are well trained, they are taking appropriate measures to ensure they are providing a safe environment."

The problem is, "licensed premises are very much in the minority in terms of where drinking happens. Police concern is very much with the uncontrolled drinking."

McGurk adds the standard refrain of any policeman discussing the part alcohol plays in their work. "It's our biggest problem by a long shot."

Nelson lawyer Steven Zindel, whose exposure to the ugly side of the drinking culture comes through his wide-ranging court work Youth Court, District Court, Family Court picks up the thread. "Young people don't really get any role-modelling about alcohol use. It's confined to licensed premises, which they can't afford to go to," he argues.

Instead, they stock up at the off-licence, and head off to their flats or their cars. "And rather than having a controlled environment, Coronation Street-style, where they can just sit and talk, they tend to watch movies or listen to loud rock music in a dark room in their flat and get tanked up.

"Then they come into Bridge St and have about two drinks because it's all they can afford, and then behave stupidly at three in the morning." And then front up in his office on a Monday morning, "meek as a lamb", looking for a way to explain their stupidity to the court.

From his own observations, McGurk says Bridge St at mid-evening on a Saturday can be a quiet place, the clientele drinking elsewhere before heading into town.

But by 3am, the closing time mill-about is in full swing as punters pour out into the street, looking for some action or just a way home.

Typically, Taylor points out, there's a shortage of taxis no way of getting the mass out of the town centre quickly. People hang around in shop doorways or taxi queues, or try walking home. The usual perceived slights flare up, the usual aggression seeps in.

Meanwhile, police get reports of hoods cruising suburban streets, looking for lone drunks to jump.

Up at Nelson Hospital's emergency department, senior ED doctor Mark Reeves notes that among the patients coming in bearing the scars of their night out, there's a common thread as they fill out the section on their ACC claim forms asking where their injury happened. "Bridge St" or "Buxton Square".

A lot of the drunks' injuries are facial trauma, Reeves says broken jaws or cheekbones as well as the occasional broken hand from someone who's thrown an ill-judged punch. Then there are the comatose drunks, those who have drunken themselves to collapse.

He explains a standard scenario. "The ambulance crew will transport them here, often unconscious. They'll be put into one of our observation bays.

"They'll be put on their side to stop them aspirating their own vomit [sucking it into their lungs, where it may drown them], and placed in a head-down position on the trolley, so if they throw up, they won't choke.

"Then they'll have a set of routine observations taken" temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar followed by a "top to toe" examination, looking for any signs of injuries (principally head injuries) they may have suffered while passing out. The worst thing, Reeves says, is the risk of missing some evidence that there is more than just a king-sized binge involved some other injury or illness that has been disguised by the alcohol.

"It takes a lot of time and a lot of resources, and it's a pretty stressful thing to have to do, to be honest."

Five years ago, "I think we had 600 presentations [annually] directly attributable to alcohol", he says. "That's steadily gone up to about 800 now."

The statistics don't tell the full story, as they won't capture episodes where alcohol is an underlying rather than a principal factor.

Reeves is at pains to point out that there is no standard model for ED patients whose attendance is the result of booze. On a Friday or Saturday night (or any public holiday, and throughout the Christmas-New Year break), "it's a fairly predictable section of society that's coming in. They tend to be young teens through to mid-20s who have been out and drinking to excess, usually in groups.

"The disturbing thing is the degree of inebriation they're presenting with and also, the gender ratio seems to becoming more and more skewed, so it's girls that are presenting heavily drunk."

But beyond that, the problem drinker who washes up in the emergency department "ranges from the 12-year-old boy who's drinking because he's been sexually abused by his uncle, through to the 85-year-old woman who's drinking herself to death because she's just lost her husband of 50 years".

A couple of years ago, he and an ED nurse, Sharon Kingsbury, investigated the worsening sorry parade of drunks they were seeing, which led to a system of automatically referring most of them to the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board's alcohol and drug service for some counselling. After all, Reeves reasons, "if you're waking up in the emergency department after a night out, that's going to put a line in the sand that there's probably a problem".

The alcohol and drug service, he points out, is far from "patriarchal" or lecturing against the evils of the demon drink.

"They do a fantastic job," he says, although the service is "overwhelmed and under-resourced" a reflection, he says, of a long-standing attitude that downplays the extent of the problem.

The manager of the Nelson Marlborough service, Eileen Varley, echoes that. "The Government's pouring money into border patrol and all that stamp out the drugs thing but they're not doing anything about the advertising that's glorifying that alcohol's a great thing.

"If anything, we don't have the range of treatment services that we used to have. This government has not really put treatment as a priority, and that's a worry.

"I've just come out of a meeting now where these parents are desperate to get their [adult] daughter into treatment, and I'm saying I'm not going to be able to get her in for four months."

Varley warns against making assumptions about the people who attend the alcohol and drug service.

"There's people from the top to the bottom, and in fact probably more of the middle-class people. The biggest percentage of people who come through our service are self-referred. You would be surprised how many people who are lawyers, doctors, dentists [visit the clinic]."

Like anyone confronted daily with the damage done by those who aren't coping with alcohol, Varley has firm opinions about what needs to happen within the community to start countering the problems.

One of her beefs is with cheap, potent ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages marketed at young people. "Over the years since these RTDs have come in, it's changed considerably. Whereas young ones would go and get half a dozen cans of beer, now they get a dozen cans of those RTDs, which they're drinking like lolly water, and it completely knocks them over."

But her real issue is with liquor advertising.

"I was brought up down the West Coast, and there was heaps of drinking happening. But everywhere I went, there wasn't a sign with a glamorous young girl drinking vodkas or those terrible RTDs. I just think that we've turned around now and glamourised drinking, and we have got to stop doing that."

Reeves sees no "silver bullet" solution. He is heartened by the Law Commission report and the fact that debate has now started, but beyond that "it's that tricky, elusive thing societal attitudes".

He also singles out RTDs "It's basically a drink designed to get girls drunk. Personally, I think they're pretty evil things" but adds that it's not fair to blame the product when personal and parental responsibility is wanting.

Reeves is an expatriate Briton who has been in New Zealand for 10 years. He says he has been staggered by drinking habits here. "In Europe, the UK has got a terrible reputation for this behaviour. New Zealand is the only country I've been to where drinking seems to be worse than the UK."

The police, hardly surprisingly, tend towards the weapons of regulation. They have successfully sought an expansion of the patchwork of liquor bans imposed by the Nelson City Council across the city, taking in various gathering places for drinking crowds either for hoons in their cars, who were taking over areas like Paddy's Knob, or the obnoxious drunks who set up offensive, occasionally violent, bingeing sessions in parks like Queen's Gardens and Anzac Park.

The bans are actively enforced, McGurk says (last year, for example, 250 instant fines were issued to minors for consuming liquor in public places) but he acknowledges the Law Commission's distaste for that mechanism, given that the bans tend to be hotch-potch and confusing to the public.

McGurk's personal prescription would be likely to include curtailing the number of off-licences and looking at trading hours. He is "vehemently" opposed to any suggestion of extending them.

"My own view is that licensed premises are open too long. There's no demonstrable need for any licensed premises to be open beyond 3am. My observation is that people coming out of bars at 3am have had more than enough to drink. They've probably had more than enough at 1am."

He thinks people troubled by the alcohol debate should read the commission's report and make submissions; its recommendations, he adds, "are achievable it just requires the will".

Taylor's weapon of choice is the "protocol" he has campaigned for, launched a year ago, which sees anybody who causes trouble in one of the city's pubs issued with a three-month banning order from all the other bars signed up to the agreement 51 to date. So far, just nine people have been served with bans, but Taylor thinks that could be seen as a sign of the system's effectiveness, and the fact that drinkers fear being blocked from socialising in pubs.

While he says it has its weaknesses, he thinks its true effectiveness would come if it was adopted nationwide and backed by lawmakers even if it worked as a deterrent rather than a watertight way of keeping troublemakers out, it would justify itself, he argues.

Zindel isn't convinced that more law is what is needed. While he jokes that it might be good for his business, he would rather it was different.

"If I had the power to make laws, I'd be doing a lot about the culture of violence we have here, particularly violent movies and computer games, the fact that we glorify violence on TV with constant crime programmes. Those things contribute to the culture, and young people emulate that consciously or subconsciously. So I would try to calm down society a bit, make it less frenetic.

"I can see where [the Law Commission] is coming from. But it's a symptom of a wider malaise in our society; alcohol is an easy thing to try and choke off, but it's not going to deal with the underlying problems, the tension and unease in our society brought about by too much of this violent machismo thing that goes on."

WHAT THE LAW COMMISSION RECOMMENDED

Scrap the Sale of Liquor Act and draft a new one.

A split purchase age: 18-year-olds can drink in bars, but only those 20 or over can buy alcohol from an off-licence.

Increase the cost of alcohol, through excise tax or a minimum price scheme.

Reduce the legal driving limit.

Wider grounds for refusing liquor licences, including the impact on the local community.

Give the Liquor Licensing Authority greater powers, including the ability to impose extra conditions on licences.

A nationwide bar closing time of 2am, unless a "one-way door" policy operates.

Make it an offence to supply a minor with alcohol, unless at a private gathering and the person is the guardian or has the guardian's permission.

More funding for alcohol treatment.

Possible advertising restrictions.

Increase the range and severity of penalties for breaches of the Sale of Liquor Act.

The Law Commission is holding public meetings on its investigation and inviting public submissions before it produces its final report to the Government next year. The report and more information can be found at lawcom.govt.nz.

- © Fairfax NZ News