KEY POINTS:
The Fun Police couldn't even wait till we're all back at work before launching their New Year offensive.
Exploiting the window of opportunity of the holiday season news hiatus, incoming Justice Minister and publicity hound Simon Power issued a stream of pronouncements that would have had the wowser tendency breaking out the dandelion tea.
The media obligingly weighed in. The ongoing collaboration between the fourth estate, with its love of health scare stories, and the health industry, with its love of scaring the crap out of us, is a textbook example of a symbiotic relationship.
No doubt there are sound arguments for raising the drinking age and tightening the drink-driving laws but don't expect anything in the way of an informed debate. As ever with these campaigns, one's objections are not so much to the proposed measures per se as the barrage of bludgeoning assertions, dodgy statistics and thin-lipped moralising used to browbeat us into going along with them.
The fact that 29 more girls aged 15 to 19 died in the period 2005-2007 than in 2000-2002 - a cynic might wonder if the missing years were ignored because they didn't conform to the narrative - supposedly demonstrates that the Sale of Liquor Act 1989 should be scrapped.
Teenagers being less susceptible to the ways of dying associated with old age, the most common causes of death were accidents, violence and poisoning. "Alcohol is a primary driver of all of those," says Rebecca Williams of Alcohol Healthwatch, an agency funded by the Ministry of Health.
She believes the tide of opinion is beginning to turn as the effects of liberalisation become clear. "There's a strong sense that the whole liberalised approach hasn't worked that well."
Perhaps she could explain how a single highly specific statistic, which might simply be an aberration, can deliver a clear verdict on the effects of liberalisation, when and in what form this strong anti-liberalisation consensus emerged, and how it was measured.
Otago University health researcher Jennie Connor tells us that "kids who drink a lot when they're young set up sexual behaviour patterns that continue". Somewhere in this tautologous train wreck of a sentence is a claim that would take several decades of comparative research to validate. Has this been done? You tell me because Ms Connor certainly didn't. Ms Connor has joined forces with a Massey University social scientist to examine the impact alcohol has on third parties - passive drinking if you will.
It will be interesting to see if their methodology is more rigorous than that which gave rise to the statistic, parroted by the news media, health groups and politicians, that passive smoking kills 388 Kiwis a year.
Despite its exactitude, this figure wasn't the result of a body count. It's a calculation of what's called population attributable risk, extrapolating from a 1996 Ministry of Health survey measuring exposure to smoking and that spectacular misnomer, the scientific literature. The computer spat out high and low end guestimates, they split the difference, and hey presto: 388 Kiwis cut down in their prime. Or youth or dotage - we don't know because there are no names. There's just a virtually random number.
This week, Assistant Police Commissioner Viv Rickard complained that our drink-driving limit is out of step with other countries "so we need to change that".
Again, lowering the limit might be the way to go but surely proponents can do better than demanding that we fall in behind other, unnamed countries. I thought we took pride in not doing that.
A few years ago, I wrote about a supposed hangover cure that, when tested, turned out to work only if you didn't drink too much. After I'd chided the scientific community for its frivolous response to a serious problem, I was sent a product called Rebound extracted, if memory serves, from the lichen of 1000-year-old trees and an accompanying blurb assuring me that this was the real deal.
I'm past the age at which one even considers ingesting unknown substances proffered by strangers so Rebound sat on a shelf until its shelf life expired. However, British scientists may have come to the party. They've created a molecule called Bridion which, it's hoped, will "cure" drug overdoses, poisoning and hangovers by attaching itself to unwanted substances in the bloodstream.
But I've gone off the idea. It now occurs to me that a genuine hangover cure could trigger the biggest jump in alcohol consumption since America imposed Prohibition and we probably drink too much as it is.
In fact, I'm open to persuasion on the need for measures to curb alcohol consumption. You just won't persuade me by insulting my intelligence.
