One in five New Zealand adults has what the Ministry of Health defines as a hazardous drinking pattern. To mark the 70 years since Alcoholics Anonymous started in New Zealand, Lee Umbers takes a look at the country's booze culture.
Jordan Luck wonders if he would have lived to see 60 if he hadn't given up the booze.
"I'd be drinking from the moment I got up basically to when I'd fall asleep, so, beer – I'd get through two to three dozen a day.
"I'd take periods off, a couple of days here, a couple of days there."
The former Exponents singer's battle with alcohol was so bad that when he did stop for a time, he'd suffer petit mal seizures - a brief loss of consciousness.
That means they have an established drinking pattern that carries a risk of harming themselves physically or mentally or having harmful social effects on the drinker or others.
Harm can refer to alcohol's effect on rates of disease, and death and injury through traffic accidents, drowning, suicide, assaults and domestic violence.
In the year to June 2017, more than 4000 people were hospitalised because of alcohol.
Hazardous drinking rates are higher in men (27 per cent) than in women (12 per cent) and are highest in the 18-24 age group (33 per cent).
And the problem isn't new to New Zealand.
Seventy years ago, Alcoholics Anonymous started helping New Zealanders. The first meeting was in the surgery of an alcoholic Auckland dentist who was passionate about helping others recover from the disease of alcoholism.
Instead of beer, Luck now drinks sparkling water with lime. If he's singing at a show, he can get through three litres in a couple of hours.
In the middle of a national tour with his Jordan Luck Band, he finds sober life "absolutely joyous".
He says his health has improved. And he's enjoying people telling him how much better he looks – "that kind of stuff goes down merrily".
To others for whom alcohol is troublesome, his message is: "If it's problematic, ease back. If you're an alcoholic, stop."
ALCOHOL IS a "psychoactive drug, which produces a compelling euphoric experience in most users, and has for thousands of years in most human societies," says professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Otago University, Dr Doug Sellman.
"In our society, however, this natural attractiveness of alcohol is pushed along by very heavy marketing by the alcohol industry as a social tonic, and almost a health tonic at times - certainly a product that indicates social success, like cigarettes 50 years ago.
"The impact of this marketing is combined with alcohol's relatively low price, high accessibility - particularly through supermarkets - teenage purchase and lack of stringent Scandinavian-like drink driving laws and produces a culture of heavy, normalised drinking, with enormous negative consequences."
Also "as people become more troubled in our increasingly disconnected and lonely society, alcohol acts as an anaesthetic for self-medication".
Alcohol Action NZ, a medically-led organisation for which Sellman is a spokesman, is an advocacy group publicising its 5+ Solution to the public and the Government in an attempt for alcohol law reform.
Sellman says the five-fold solution to tackling our drinking culture is:
Award-winning sports radio and TV talk show host Murray Deaker can remember the date he stopped drinking - January 14, 1978.
On holiday in Pauanui with his wife and their three young children, he "very nearly drowned because I had rowed a rowboat, which was most unseaworthy, across to Tairua - to get two dozen beer".
"[I] stayed there, got a belly-full and then had to row back over the estuary.
"And by the time I got back, the rowboat was full of water," says Deaker, 73.
A close mate staying at their house said to him: "You're killing yourself, mate."
"And my wife, she had on a number of occasions said to me, you're a totally different person when you drink than when you are sober. She just looked distraught.
"I thought — every problem I've got is alcohol-based.
"And I've never drunk since."
Deaker, who recalls first getting drunk at 16, says he had liked the fun and companionship of social drinking "and the fact it probably gave me confidence that I didn't have".
He was a secondary school teacher throughout the 1970s and he kept drinking, aside from a period in 1971 when he stopped to train for the New Zealand Teachers rugby side.
"All my performances in everything I did were booze-affected.
"It brought out the extremes in me. So instead of being confident, I became arrogant. Instead of having sensitivity, I would become over-emotional. Instead of holding strong opinions, I would become violent."
But after becoming sober in 1978, he got clarity – literally just a few days later.
Opening the batting for Rodney in a Dargaville Shield cricket match, he scored a century.
Facing the first ball, "I looked up and for the very first time for probably 10 years, I could see the seam.
"I'd only had a week off the booze and I got 100, and I thought, 'Mate this is amazing'."
Deaker says he shouted a dozen beers after the match but when asked why he wasn't drinking any, he made up an excuse he had a bet for a crate of spirits that he would stay off alcohol for three months.
When that time was nearly up he admitted to a long-time friend: "There's been no bet. I'm an alcoholic.
"He said, 'It's taken you a long time to work that out mate, because we've all known that for so long'."
Deaker says the support he has had from family and friends to quit booze and stay sober has been 100 per cent.
"I could not have done it on my own."
His life after quitting alcohol has been beyond his wildest dreams.
"I've enjoyed good health, I've enjoyed success in my profession, wonderful family relationships. I've got good friends."
Deaker won best sports presenter at the Radio Awards seven times, and in 2009 he received the Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to broadcasting.
In the way that anti-smoking lobby groups had tackled smoking rates, he hoped for action "to attack the booze culture of New Zealanders and to turn that around".
Alcoholics Anonymous is one group widely recognised for effectively helping people achieve sobriety, he says.
NEW ZEALAND'S first official AA group meeting was held in dentist Alf Joughin's Devonport surgery in June 1948.
Joughin's brother-in-law, a doctor aware Alf needed help for his alcoholism, had heard about Ian MacEwan, AA's first member in New Zealand.
In the waiting room, MacEwan picked up the Reader's Digest and read about AA, which was founded in Ohio by stockbroker Bill Wilson and surgeon Bob Smith.
He corresponded with AA in New York and in 1946 Wilson appointed him New Zealand's AA representative.
MacEwan travelled the country sharing the organisation's message. His first success was with Joughin, who became sober and stayed that way for the following four decades until his death.
There are now 464 weekly meetings of AA groups throughout the country, 139 of them in Auckland. There are an estimated 4000 successfully recovering members nationwide.
One of those with most cause to celebrate is 94-year-old Bluey - AA members are only identified by their first names - who was helped off alcohol by Joughin and has been sober for the past 63 years.
Joining the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy in 1941 at 17, Bluey survived the sinking of his ship by a U-boat. But his introduction to rum while in service in World War II would later nearly prove his undoing.
Bluey says he didn't have alcohol before the navy, and initially had lime juice because he was too young for the tots of rum handed out.
It became a problem when he returned home after the war and alcohol was more readily available.
He has attended AA meetings weekly in many countries through his more than six decades of sobriety.
He also went on to havea successful career including a number of positions of public responsibility. "Positions I would not have been able to manage had I been drinking."
Auckland AA member Paul says weekly meetings, attended by a handful to 60-plus people each, run for about an hour.
Ages range from early 20s to mid-90s, and run the gamut of New Zealand society.
"I've met judges. I've met gang members. The common denominator is they've got a problem with the grog.
"For each alcoholic who stops drinking, untold numbers of families, friends, neighbours and employers, as well as healthcare, psychiatric, social and probation professionals also benefit."
Paul, who had been problem-drinking for five years after a series of emotional shocks, thought he was suffering from early dementia when he joined AA a decade ago because his memory had started to deteriorate.
"But when I stopped drinking, my memory came back."
He has been sober for eight years now.
Those who tend to remain sober are those who continue to attend the AA meetings – the heart of the programme, really, he says.
"It's a lifelong thing, but it's done on a day-to-day basis."
• The highest rate for females is in the 10-19 age group, highest for males is 20-29.
• In the year to December 2017, total volume of alcoholic beverage for consumption rose .5 per cent, to 476m litres (2 standard drinks a day for each adult).
• The average annual consumption is equal to 8.7 litres of pure alcohol per person (aged 15-plus), behind Australia, 9.7, UK, 9.4 and the US, 8.9.
• 464 weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
• AA's 70-year milestone will be held at Takapuna Grammar School on June 30 - chosen as it's the closest venue to the first meeting that could accommodate such a huge celebration.