Sweet new drinks can kill kids, says expert

Murray Clearwater says two bottles of the drink are potent enough to kill someone. Photo / Steven McNicholl

Alcohol experts are warning parents to keep their children away from cheap, sweetly flavoured drinks laced with enough alcohol to kill them.

Liquor Licensing Inspectors Institute president Murray Clearwater held up two 1.25-litre bottles of a raspberry lemonade called Big Foot at a conference in Manukau yesterday which he bought at a price of "$15 for two".

The drink is eight per cent alcohol - double that of a standard beer.

"That's enough to kill someone, let alone a child," he said.

"Twenty standard drinks [the two bottles combined] could create gross intoxication in an adult, let alone a young person, and puts them at greater risk of walking in front of a car or alcohol poisoning. A thousand people die a year directly related to alcohol."

He said such cheap, sweet drinks were clearly aimed at young people and should be banned.

"Mum and dad don't understand that their kids can buy that sort of product at that sort of price.

"There needs to be a social impact statement where people manufacturing this type of product need to identify that it was designed for an adult market. This was not."

His call was picked up several times among the 350 people at the Alcohol Advisory Council's annual conference, which ends today.

Drug and alcohol counsellor Fialauia Toailoa-Amituanai said the sweet new drinks were encouraging Pasifika women to "leave the men behind in their drinking habits", risking having brain-damaged babies.

"The new bottles that are hitting the market now are so dressed up that they look like perfume bottles, but when you look at the alcohol content they are lethal," she said.

Another questioner asked Law Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Palmer to explain the process for bringing products like Big Foot to the market.

Commission adviser Cate Brett said there was no process. Alcohol companies were as free as any other business to introduce new products.

Sir Geoffrey said the commission's report on alcohol last week recommended setting up a new health committee with power to ban dangerous alcohol products.

"We found in Australia that they had iceblocks with alcohol. They were banned in New South Wales," he said.

"They had vapour rooms where you could get drunk in a room of alcoholic vapour. They banned that.

""There needs to be some ability in those cases to stop that product being marketed on the basis of an expert drug committee."

But Julian Davidson of Independent Liquor, which markets Big Foot, said his product was not marketed to youth and was clearly labelled as a "multi-serve pack", indicating that it should not all be drunk at once.