In the coldest month of the year, we’re urged to deepen our torment by embracing temperance.
Terrible timing.
July’s
the moon of comfort kai, bedsocks, upped shower temperatures, vindaloo, flannelette and flame.
It’s the final four weeks duck shooters have to sit in a frigid maimai before a warming single-malt back in the kitchen.
The seventh month is also traditionally the start of the All Blacks’ test season. A tough drinking window to shut.
‘Tis a bad month for abstinence.
But here we are again.
This year’s Dry July funds are destined to help New Zealanders affected by cancer. Notwithstanding the noble cause and the chance to win a Panasonic fridge-freezer “full of non-alcoholic drinks”, the push doesn’t resonate loudly.
As of late last week, just 4667 brave souls had registered on the Dry July website. While there’ll be others “unofficially” tackling the challenge, it’s a low number given it represents only 0.008% of our 5.3 million population.
Such paltry buy-in highlights a niggly aversion to curbing consumption.
Alcohol contributes to about 200 health conditions and is a group 1 carcinogen, meaning all levels of drinking increase the risk of cancer.
But we don’t need the stats. Take a recycling-day stroll on any residential street and behold the monuments of glass in sin bins betraying our habit.
Alcohol-related family violence, health woes and tragedies on our roads don’t deter us. We’re disinterested yet don’t doubt the consequences.
We even go so far as acknowledging them before shouting a mate a drink: “What’s your poison?”
It’s a dream stance if you’re in the alcohol industry or one its lobbies.
In 2019, the director of the National Addiction Centre at the time, University of Otago Professor Doug Sellman, claimed our country needed “a new morality”.
He was responding to a coroner’s findings and subsequent Hawke’s Bay Today story on the 2017 booze-related death of a Napier businessman.
The coroner concluded the well-known local unintentionally yet “effectively drank himself to death” in a heavy whisky session.
Sellman lamented that the tragedy isn’t rare. “A case of death by acute alcohol intoxication occurs every week or two in New Zealand.”
He said while “morality” was a word usually associated with religion, it should also apply to the national swill.
Hats off to Dry July, which – unseasonal as it is – sparks that kōrero.
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