KEY POINTS:
Alcohol-related crashes involving drivers aged 18 and 19 have jumped since the legal drinking age was lowered to 18.
A Massey University study has found that alcohol-related crashes declined steadily from almost 300 for every 100,000 drivers in that age bracket in 1990 to below 100 at the
end of the decade, reflecting the national campaign against drink-driving.
But the alcohol-related crash rate bounced back after the drinking age was lowered to 18 in December 1999 - from 93 in 2000 to 144 by 2003.
Later figures were not available when the study was published last year in the international journal Addiction.
Researcher Taisia Huckle, who led the study, concluded that it was "likely that the lowering of the purchase age for alcohol has contributed to increases in harmful outcomes for young people in New Zealand, including more serious outcomes such as traffic crashes".
"The lowered purchase age appears not to have been a good social investment for young people," she said.
The study investigated prosecutions for drink-driving and disorder offences as well as alcohol-related crash rates.
It found that prosecutions of 18- and 19-year-olds for driving with excess alcohol were steady at around 2000 for every 100,000 people in the age group in every year up to 1999, but then jumped from 2000 onwards to about 2300 in 2003.
However, prosecutions in the age group for disorder offences, such as offensive language, behaviour offences and obstructing arrest, increased more slowly after 1999 than they had in the previous five years.
Although people committing disorder offences are more likely than others to have been drinking at the time of the offence, not all disorderly offending is alcohol-related.
The director of Massey's Auckland-based Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (Shore Centre), Professor Sally Casswell, said the lower drinking age was part of "a period of really quite intense liberalisation of policy around alcohol".
Alcohol brand advertising was allowed on radio and television from February 1992. In December 1999, at the same time as the lower drinking age, supermarkets and grocery outlets were allowed to sell beer and Sunday trading was permitted.
Liquor consumption per person had been declining for 20 years, but increased by 2.8 per cent from 1999 to last year, with some evidence of increased "binge drinking" in the younger age groups.
Professor Casswell told a conference last month that the budget for campaigns against alcohol was "minuscule" compared with the advertising budgets of the alcohol industry.
Drinking was "deeply embedded in New Zealand culture", she said.
Associate Health Minister Damien O'Connor announced a review of alcohol advertising last year.
The review report, published on Friday, recommends legislation to minimise exposure to alcohol advertising for young people under the legal drinking age.
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