I won't drink to that

Tonight I am having drinks with a couple of friends. As is the New Zealand way with such a small group, each of us will likely shout at least one round. We are unlikely to worry about the cost—the cost of the round and the cost of the individual drinks. The cost of alcohol is something we rarely worry about and rarely comes to mind. Which is why the proposition of raising the minimum price for alcohol is unlikely to have any effect on what some see as an out of control drinking culture, particularly among the young. I say this because of two personal observations: most of the young I know who drink to excess can afford it and don’t, in any case, spend their money on much else—they live to drink with their mates--that’s it. They are not going to movies or restaurants; they’re going to bars and parks and beaches and their only expense apart from petrol is alcohol. The second reason that price will have little effect on the young is that it simply doesn’t take that much alcohol to make them drunk. It’s not going to break the bank before they are paralytic. Price therefore, on two counts, is not a factor. Proponents, however, will point to the success raising the price of cigarettes has had on reducing smoking. Different case. Price certainly had an effect but the increase in the cost of cigarettes has been astronomical and nobody is seriously suggesting increases on that scale for alcohol; secondly, various lobby groups, including the health sector, have been successful in making smoking socially unacceptable, and that’s probably a bigger factor than anything in making people quit. Drinking, for all its perceived faults, is not socially unacceptable and in fact is a social adhesive. Finally who in all seriousness came up with the perverse logic that because some, mostly young, have a problem with drink, the rest of us should be made to pay more? I don’t have an answer to the youth drinking problem. But I know that alcohol costing a few dollars more will be ineffectual as well as unfair. Raising the drinking age also seems, these days, unenforceable. Greater parental control may be helpful. Maybe the answer is that which worked with cigarettes and, to some extent, drink driving: make it socially unacceptable. God knows we see enough drunks acting as complete idiots—if there was only some way of turning less of a spotlight on them, and more of a mirror.