Booze: is it heading in the same direction as a quick fag?

BY TAHU POTIKI

OPINION: I used to enjoy having a cigarette after tea or over a beer. It sounds blasphemous nowadays, but it wasn't so 10 years ago.

When we were kids most houses were not smokefree and neither was our classroom. The bars and restaurants were absolute ashtrays and when I first started working in hospital kitchens we could happily puff away while we were on the job preparing food.

But, thankfully, that has all changed. I am not thankful because I am prudish or I want to control people's lives but because it was doing so much damage and we needed to tidy it up. A plethora of ailments and health problems that are associated with smoking may well be reduced now there is a significant decrease in the uptake of smoking and many thousands of people have ceased smoking.

At a young age, like nearly all my friends, I had fallen victim to the image of smoking and the social circles I travelled in and I began smoking as a teenager. During my 20s I was bombarded with anti-smoking messages, health warnings, increased prices and social judgment. This combination of factors eventually pressured me to stop smoking.

Similarly, I am not prudish about drinking and I have no problem with having a few drinks myself despite it being similar to tobacco in terms of the harm it causes and the costs to our community. But for some reason we are yet to see major changes in drinking behaviour in the way we have seen with smoking.

There have been several anti- alcohol campaigns run over the years but the message we generally receive is that the simple act of drinking alcohol is, in itself, not that bad.

Drinking and driving is very bad. Drinking and swinging schoolchildren is also to be frowned upon. Getting very drunk and then sleeping with a stranger is bad (sometimes).

The drink-driving message has certainly got across to some demographics and the idea of a sober driver is now the norm amongst many groups of young people. This was not the case 20 years ago.

But the hidden message we need to be aware of is that a sober driver, in effect, means drunk passengers. One possible way to look at a sober driver is that he or she actually enables a lot of other people to get completely sloshed.

And therein lies the distinction between the anti-smoking message and the alcohol campaigns.

There really is no such thing as safe smoking. We now believe that any form of active or passive smoking is dangerous to our health. It will cause cancer. It will cause respiratory difficulties. It will cause death.

But when it comes to alcohol we believe there is such a thing as safe drinking. So long as we don't drive home while drunk, beat up the family, cook up a feed of chips, go to sleep and burn the house down, then it was quite possibly a safe night out drinking.

So we bombard the public with messages about what they shouldn't do while they are drunk - but no messages about not drinking or not getting drunk at all. Such message givers are seen as Calvinistic, puritanical, unrealistic extremists.

This may explain our current policy framework. In a society that suggests that drinking is all right so long as you don't do anything bad while you are drunk your policies may let younger and younger people buy alcohol. It might allow multimillion-dollar corporations to design and fund marketing strategies targeting these young people with very cheap, easy to drink, hard liquor derivatives.

Maybe you would allow a proliferation of inner-city liquor outlets to pop up, let your local dairy sell enough wine, beer and cider to knock out an elephant and extend licensing hours to sun-up.

That is if you really, really believed that alcohol didn't cause any harm.

If you genuinely believed alcohol was harmless it would also be a shame to reduce an industry which employs over 70,000 people and generates $85 million in sales every week in New Zealand.

But then again if you did believe that it caused harm because it was classified as carcinogenic, just like asbestos and tobacco, or that it contributed to at least 60 different known diseases and conditions. Or if you were seriously concerned about the 600 children born each year with foetal alcohol syndrome or the 1000 alcohol deaths in New Zealand every year then maybe the policy framework would look very different.

You would try to reduce its availability, make it less attractive to at-risk populations and promote greater awareness of the health effects.

Like I said I don't mind a drink, but I said that about cigarettes once, too, so my judgment is not great.

I probably need someone to step in and save me from myself.

- © Fairfax NZ News