KEY POINTS:
When A bill to lower the drinking age was being debated in Parliament - and by members of the public through the media - I was all for lowering the age from 20 to 18.
You'll have heard all the arguments in favour of lowering the age before,
I'm sure - if they're old enough to vote, fight for their country, have sex and get married, surely they're old enough to have a beer. If they learn to drink sensibly, then they won't binge drink. And then there was the argument that they're all drinking now anyway so they might as well do so legitimately. That particular one was a little shaky I grant you, but really.
At 18, I was living away from home, earning a living and drinking like a navvy. And it didn't do me any harm. Well, not much harm. Not any sort of harm that couldn't be rectified. I was all for treating 18-year-olds as the young adults they are. After much debate and many submissions from aid agencies, youth workers, the police and the medical profession - who were all absolutely appalled at the very idea - Parliament voted to lower the drinking age. And haven't we all been proved to be wrong.
What has transpired is exactly what youth workers, the police and health agencies predicted. I don't know why I thought I knew better. Study after study has appeared since 1999, showing the damage and destruction that has followed since the drinking age was lowered.
In 2004, a Christchurch doctor said the number of young people aged between 18 and 20 presenting at the emergency department with potentially fatal alcohol poisoning had doubled since the law change.
In Auckland in 2004, the number of young people admitted with alcohol-related injuries was 40 per cent higher than it had been in 1999.
Peer-reviewed studies found it was highly likely the increase in the number of alcohol-related traffic incidents involving 15- to 17-year-olds could be attributed to the law change - and on and on it went.
Report after report, submission after submission, vomiting sexually abused teen after drunken smashed up young adult - all showing that Parliament had made a mistake.
Matt Robson, who had voted in favour of lowering the age, was man enough to admit he'd got it wrong. With his boss, Jim Anderton, he worked on a private member's bill to try to turn back the tide, and when the bill was drawn from the ballot, he had every expectation his bill would effectively move through Parliament to pass into law.
However, the genie was out of the bottle and an 11th-hour promise from Labour that it would review the laws surrounding the sale of liquor and more vigorously police laws already in place effectively scuppered the bill.
And so the kids keep drinking the booze that the adults provide them. It's not the 18-year-olds who are the main problem - it's those children even younger. The latest report, one out this week from Wellington Hospital, says there's been a six-fold increase in the number of drunken youths being admitted to the hospital based on data from the past four years. Young women, aged 14 to 15, were leading the increase and drinking admissions for the under-20s now account for 40 per cent of alcohol-related admissions.
The problem of teen drinking is getting worse. Who knows? Maybe if the drinking age hadn't been lowered, binge drinking among kids might have increased anyway. But the law change hasn't helped. However, we can't blame the legislators. If 13-year-olds are drinking themselves sick, the only people responsible for that are their parents. Your kid winds up at A&E with alcohol poisoning - that's your responsibility, not the Government's.
Everyone bemoans the fact that our kids are boorish, bellowing and bare chested, ready-to-drinks in hand and flecks of vomit speckling their chins. We yearn for the day when our children will be sophis-ticated, well-groomed young men and women sipping Chianti and discussing Descartes. Maybe we should lead by example. Because all the problems we see in our kids are just mini-me versions of our own grown-up issues with alcohol. And until we change ourselves no law change will help our teens.
