Roger Brooking: Getting Away With Murder

Alcohol sells so well in New Zealand, it doesn’t need to be advertised. However, the liquor industry spends approximately $75 million a year on advertising and sponsorship.

Sponsorship and television ads which promote alcohol are now an integral part of our drinking culture - a culture which legitimizes the acceptability of binge drinking. Alcohol ads normalise and reinforce drinking among young people as the way to have fun and bond with their peer group. The result is that for young males in particular, getting drunk seems to have become one of the rites of passage to adulthood.

The industry’s own advertising guidelines state that liquor ads should be socially responsible and not targeted at minors. However, the breweries generally advertise their product on television in scenarios which appeal to hot-blooded young males - such as the Tui beer ads in which young men steal beer from a factory run by semi-naked ‘gorgeous girls’. These ads are often amusing. However, considering that alcohol is a toxic drug that kills over 1,000 New Zealanders every year, and contributes to accidents, addictions, disease, violence, suicide and crime - marketing it as a fun product worth stealing can hardly be called socially responsible.

On top of this, the liquor industry earns approximately $12 billion a year from sales, while the devastation and damage caused by alcohol costs the taxpayer around $16 billion. There is simply nothing socially responsible about promoting a product which ends up imposing a massive financial burden on the country and costs the taxpayer even more than the revenue it generates. This is not only socially irresponsible, it’s an unmitigated financial disaster.

Government could make the liquor industry more responsibility and use profits from the sale of alcohol to pay for some of the destruction it causes. Unfortunately, alcohol provides only about $700 million a year in taxation - which doesn’t even cover the health costs imposed by binge drinking, let alone the added costs for police, the courts and the corrections department. What this means is that the burden of financial responsibility for the damage falls directly on the taxpayer. You and I have to pay for the destruction caused by alcohol.

In addition to being allowed to advertise on television, liquor companies are not even required to place health warning labels on alcohol containers as part of their marketing. Can you imagine a pharmaceutical company distributing a drug that kills over 1,000 New Zealanders a year, advertising it on television and failing to provide warning labels about the potential risks? Politicians and media would be in a frenzy and the law suits would come rolling in.

Allowing a toxic product to be advertised on television, deliberately marketed to young people and sold without a warning label is an incredibly cavalier approach to public safety. In effect, our government has given the liquor industry a licence to commit mass murder. If this was any other drug, those responsible for condoning and creating carnage on such a scale would be in prison for the rest of their lives.

Roger Brooking is Clinical Manager ADAC Ltd
Alcohol & Drug Assessment & Counselling

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