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Opinion: If you go through the back catalogue of the times you got too drunk – mine is quite extensive – I bet most of them happened at your home or someone else’s.
It’s actually quite hard to get drunk in a bar. There are distractions: other people, music and food. There’s waiting to get served, smaller drink sizes and the expectations of your friends and other patrons. There’s the bar staff, security and of course, the price barrier.
Drinking in a pub, club or bar celebrates a lot of what is good about alcohol: a social experience where the booze itself is not necessarily the main act.
The Greeks, who pretty much invented sitting around drinking and wittering on, had a symposiarch who ran the show. He would water down the wine (usually to about 3-4% alcohol), call out problem drinkers and cut them off.
Buying cheap booze from the supermarket or bottle store strips out much of the social and supervisory elements of drinking. And we’ve been doing much more of it. In 2007, 68% of alcohol was bought from an off-licence, but a recent study of drinking behaviour for the Evidence-Based Policing Centre now puts the figure at 80%.
Now, finally, tighter regulation is coming for bottle stores and supermarkets, in Auckland at least.
Auckland Council has spent a decade – and more than $1 million of ratepayers’ money in legal fees – battling the vested liquor industry interests to introduce a Local Alcohol Policy (LAP), setting times and conditions for alcohol sales.
Barring some last-minute power lobbying, bottle stores and supermarkets won’t be able to sell alcohol after 9pm and a moratorium will freeze new off-licences for two years in 23 areas already saturated with booze outlets.
Christchurch, which gave up on an LAP in 2017, after also spending big on legal fees fighting the liquor industry, is considering following suit.
Availability is one of the big levers to reduce alcohol harm. The other big one is price.
The police study, which focused on drinking in central Wellington, found that by midnight nearly 80% of drinkers on Courtenay Place had been preloading (and were more drunk than those who hadn’t been).
Close to half of the preloaders said they were motivated by price.
Interestingly, the preloaders who had bought their alcohol from a supermarket had higher breath levels than those who hadn’t – probably, the report said, due to cut-price deals.
The price differential between off and on licences has been growing.
In 2013, a 400ml can of beer was 2.7 times more expensive at the bar than at the off-licence.
By 2023, that differential had risen to 3.4 on average, but the police study said it could often be much greater, noting $22 can buy a dozen 330ml bottles of beer at an off-licence, or two bottles in a city bar.
The report recommended considering minimum unit pricing (MUP) - setting a floor below which alcohol cannot legally be sold.
MUP is in place in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It lifts the price of off-licence booze but doesn’t affect on-licence prices (which are heavily marked up anyway). This reduces the differential between booze bought in a bar and a bottle store, and encourages people to support (and be supported by) the hospitality industry.
I will eat a wine box (I don’t drink alcohol now) if the government introduces MUP.
I just can’t see them doing it. They recently rejected an independent report which recommended increasing the alcohol levy – which pays for public health measures to reduce alcohol harm – to collect $37 million. The government opted to collect less half that, adding less than half a cent to a can of beer.
But the voices for tighter regulation for the liquor industry are getting louder.
In June, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said New Zealand should debate reduced opening hours and increasing alcohol prices as trade-offs to reduce alcohol harm.
The review of the alcohol levy also sought to find out how much alcohol harm in New Zealand costs. The figure, according to an analysis from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research came in at $9.1 billion.
And again, just this week, a government-commissioned Otago University study found that, in 2018 alone, alcohol was responsible for about 900 deaths (42% from cancer), nearly 30,000 hospitalisations and close to 130,000 ACC claims.
Many reading this may ask why they – as responsible drinkers – should be inconvenienced by those who drink too much. It’s a fair question.
The three actions the World Health Organisation says have the most impact on alcohol harm – reduced opening hours, hiking prices and restricting advertising – are incursions into personal freedom. But those freedoms have to be set against the cost of cheap and readily available alcohol. Is $9.1 billion of social harm too high a price?
The coalition government, which claims to be tough on crime, could ask itself another question: Given the contribution alcohol makes to crime, wouldn’t tighter regulation be one way to actually make a difference?
Guyon Espiner is an investigative journalist and presenter at RNZ.
