Wowser

Doug Sellman, in today's Press [added: not online, but almost identical to the one in last month's New Zealand Herald], notes:

• Individual responsibility is a "tired old mantra"
• There are at least 700,000 heavy drinkers in New Zealand [population around 4 million]
• Per capita alcohol consumption up 9 percent over the last decade [but somehow "heavy drinking" has remained constant"]
• He's pushing alcohol down the road already traveled by tobacco:

  Change is coming. France has already brought alcohol in line with tobacco in terms of marketing and advertising, banning broadcast alcohol advertising as well as sponsorship of all sporting and cultural events.
  
  The University of Otago is leading the way in New Zealand; taking the enormous step forward in banning all alcohol promotion from all its premises and functions.
  
  A small town or city or even a large New Zealand city might well do the same...

• Alcohol promoters and vendors are "drug pushers".

In Sellman's world, alcohol promoters are drug pushers and Roger Kerr is one of their allies helping them in obfuscating their way out of taking responsibility for their products. Wonder what colour the sky is over there.

He also really doesn't like the Woodstock Bourbon and Cola ads, recently lauded by the New Zealand Marketing Magazine's "Stop Press" blog. Says Sellman

The ad also seems to be encouraging middle-aged women to get their teenage clothes back on and flirt with their son's best mates.
I presume some would defend these adverts as responsible business practice and contributing to a healthy society.

It sounds like Sellman's ...issues... go beyond alcohol.



I don't go for the ready-mixed drinks, but the ads are very good.

A few things Alcohol Action NZ won't tell you about alcohol

Doug Sellman's article from last week's Press, noted last week, is still bugging me. A few things Alcohol Action NZ won't tell you about alcohol:

• Sellman lists alcohol alongside scary things like asbestos as a known carcinogen (in the Press article). But here are some other known carcinogens that could have been listed alongside alcohol instead and would have been perhaps a bit less scary: ciclosporin (used to prevent organ rejection after transplant), estrogen-based oral contraceptives and menopausal therapy, risky sex (Hepatitis B & C, HPV, HIV), the sun, mineral oils, salted fish, wood dust, painting, boot and shoe manufacture and repair.


• He cites Corrao et al as saying "Alcohol cardio-protection has been talked up". You might think this means there's no protective effect. But that's not what Corrao says. Corrao shows rather that there are strong protective effects from alcohol consumption; it's just that they're slightly smaller in a subset of higher quality studies than in the full set of studies. So, where a full sample of studies finds the risk-minimizing consumption of alcohol at 25 grams per day (2.5 standard drinks), the protection washing out at 90 grams per day (9 standard drinks) and harmful coronary effects kicking in at 113 grams per day, the "selected studies" find protection is maximized at 20 grams per day, protective effects lost at 72 grams per day, and harmful coronary effects kicking in at 89 grams per day. What a shocking "talking up" of cardio-protection! Harmful effects kick in at 9 drinks per day rather than at 11! You should aim to drink 2 rather than 2.5 standard drinks per day if you want to minimize your risk of heart disease! Shocking! It looks like you have to trade off increased cancer risk against reduced risk of heart disease over most folks' relevant ranges of alcohol consumption.


• Notes high proportions of arrests and crimes that are "related" to alcohol. But what I've never seen numbers on is what proportion those "alcohol related" crimes would have taken place in the absence of alcohol. You could just as easily say that 100% of crimes are "Oxygen related", 50% are mullet-related and 25% involve the wearing of t-shirts that say "No Fear". Ok, without the oxygen, none of those oxygen-related crimes would have taken place. But would a policy getting rid of No Fear t-shirts really prevent crime? Mightn't criminals switch to even riskier shirts? This is actually a reasonably serious point. If you ramp up the price of alcohol, how many criminals switch to P before going out to do nasty stuff? One of the country's more prominent criminologists suggests in informal chats that he reckons about 60% of these "alcohol-related" crimes would have taken place anyway even if alcohol disappeared; the actual crime-costs of alcohol are then about 60% lower than typically reported as alcohol in those cases is more like wearing a No Fear t-shirt: just something criminals like to do while offending but wouldn't stop them from offending in its absence.


• And, Alcohol Action NZ leaves out, of course, all the academic literature on things like drinkers earning more money and the strong anecdotal evidence (collected by my casual observation) that drinkers are simply better people, on average, than teetotalers and healthists.

The new tobacco

Further evidence that the anti-alcohol folks want to bring alcohol down the same track of "de-norm, tax, stigmatize, ban" as tobacco comes from a piece in Thursday's Press by Doug Sellman:

The same landscape changes that have occurred with tobacco can now begin to occur with heavy drinking. Yes, we can have our alcohol and drink it too as part of the "good life". But this will happen only if the alcohol industry is brought under better control and a much more controlled drinking environment than we have at present....

Careful, that slope is slippery.

Sellman points to his advocacy website, alcoholaction.co.nz. Digging through the website, we find that they're funded by the John Dobson Memorial Foundation, a registered charity in New Zealand. I wonder whether I could have a pro-alcohol lobby group be registered as a charity for taxation purposes in New Zealand. Sellman is clearly soliciting funds for the charity to help in his anti-alcohol lobbying activities.

As you'll see in the information sheet the campaign is being administered through the John Dobson Memorial Foundation, a charitable trust, registered under the Charities Act 2005. You can either send a cheque made out to Liquor Control to PO Box 433, Christchurch 8140, or alternatively make a donation through internet banking to Liquor Control, 38-9009-0359942-00.
Dig deep comrade!

So it looks like donors to his organization get a tax deduction.

In the US, political advocacy groups are given a rather different tax treatment than other kinds of charities, and charities have to be very careful not to stray too far into lobbying work lest they fall into a different part of the tax code. Guess things are different here.