High Sobriety (25 page)

The war against the wowser endures. From this libertarian standpoint, if I want to get absolutely hammered on cheap grog and vomit into my handbag of an evening, I should be allowed to do that, with as little interference from the state as possible. My dining companion argues that alcohol is already regulated more heavily than most products, in terms of how it's produced, how and when it can be bought, and to whom it can be sold. He says that it's ‘punitively taxed', and that there are tight restrictions on how it can be advertised.

I have to pull him up on this one. I've written many stories about the industry's ineffectual, self-regulated advertising code. The code stipulates that alcohol adverts can't link drinking with sexual success. It's hard to reconcile that with Jim Beam's ‘The Neighbours' campaign, which showed topless Swedish sunbathers being stalked by peeping toms. The bourbon-maker's adverts, shown as short clips on television and a longer, more explicit version online, featured two blondes in G-strings applying sunscreen, bouncing on a trampoline, and stripping naked as they're watched through a hedge by ‘Stevo next door' and his mates. The message wasn't subtle: drinking bourbon makes the act of sexual stalking not only acceptable, but also much more enjoyable. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn it was 1978 and I was watching a Benny Hill skit. Jim Beam pulled the ads after health commentators branded it one of the most offensive promotions in the industry's history. What was worse, they argued, was that these ads — in which a naked woman states, ‘We say, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, take off your cozzie”' — were deemed appropriate through a pre-vetting process under the industry's self-governed Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code. Public-health campaigners said the advert only served to prove what they had been saying for years: the alcohol industry could not be trusted to regulate itself. It came after an advert for James Boag's depicted a woman holding a beer while sitting on the stairs with her legs spread, wearing only a coat and her underwear. This, too, passed the code's pre-vetting stage. As one health contact said to me at the time, ‘When you see ads like that, you have to think that these guys are taking the piss. Self-regulation is a joke.'

My guest concedes that the Jim Beam campaign showed an ‘embarrassing lack of judgement', but says no system is perfect, and the pre-vetting process was tightened in subsequent years.

When I ask if the industry uses advertising to entice children, this alcohol executive can't hide his frustration. ‘Can you show me an ad that advertises to children? Are you talking about the advertisements in
Dolly
and
Girlfriend
? No, you can't be, because those magazines don't carry alcohol advertising. But if you ask most parents, they'd tell you that the industry does advertise in those magazines.' He says his industry is increasingly having to defend its advertising against ‘the vibe': the low expectations of the industry's ethics, and the concerns of desperately worried parents, regardless of whether alcohol companies are behaving improperly. ‘I wish people who say alcohol advertising is causing kids to drink would actually put up an ad and say, “This appeals to children.” We could debate that, but as it stands, it's just this easy slur to throw out.'

Although he can't be held responsible for the behaviour of his overseas peers, it's hard to believe that the United Kingdom's Lambrini, with its ‘girls just wanna have fun' strapline, advertising a range of sparkling ‘wine-style' drinks in flavours such as cherry, peach, and apple and blackcurrant, aimed these products at a mature market. Internal industry documents obtained by the 2009 House of Commons inquiry into alcohol advertising showed that the biggest market for Halewood International's Lambrini, and its fruit-cocktail drink Caribbean Twist, was consumers aged 15 to 24. The company's own focus groups clearly show that the product is regarded by the public as a ‘kids' drink', yet a creative brief for Lambrini's 2005 campaign describes its target audience as 18 to 24. The brief states the product is a ‘light, easy to drink, affordable (wanna be wine) that gets their night out or in off to a good start. They'll drink bucket loads of the stuff and still manage to last the duration.' The same brief adds: ‘Drinking starts early! Early afternoon at the weekend or straight after work Monday to Friday meeting your girly mates and getting on it is the only way forward.' Two years later, a television advert for Lambrini that featured energetic dance routines was described internally as a ‘cross between Myspace and
High School the
[sic]
Musical
.'

Given the globalised nature of the alcohol industry, is it beyond the realms of possibility that similar conversations are taking place in advertising agencies for Australian brands? The public-health lobby certainly believes it's happening, although sometimes their paranoia seems unwarranted. There have been times over the last few years of reporting on alcohol where I've seen certain sections of the public-health field become so convinced that the industry deliberately sets out to target children, they're jumping at shadows. When Jim Beam and Bundaberg brought out gift packs of bourbon- and rum-flavoured fudge in 2010 and were accused of trying to lure children into drinking, despite the products being completely non-alcoholic, I had to ask myself if perhaps the jihad on binge drinking had become a bit hysterical.

‘They think we set out to recruit the next generation of drinkers, but nothing could be further from the truth because we don't have the financial resources to do it, even if we thought it was a good idea. The reasons people drink and how much they drink are so much beyond the industry's control or influence,' my lunch guest says. ‘It's just a laughable idea. I've never seen a report that says, “And how is our long-term drinking-addiction project going?” I just don't think it's happening at all.'

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the public-health boffins and academics are paranoid. They won't be happy until prohibition is introduced, and the multinational merchants of death are in court for child endangerment. Sandra Jones, from the University of Wollongong, one of Australia's leading researchers on teenage binge drinking and a formidable thorn in the industry's side, says that she has every reason to be suspicious. At conferences, she presents her findings on what drives young people to drink, and how marketing affects their choice. Sometimes, there will be alcohol industry representatives in the audience. At one conference in New Zealand, three men wearing suits and carrying briefcases walked in, sat down, and began taking notes during her presentation. They left without talking to her. ‘They won't say a word to me while they're there, but the next day they'll put out a press release attacking me and rubbishing my research. They don't want to engage in debate — they just want to shut it down,' she told me at a recent conference. She's been called a liar by members of the industry, but more worrying is her belief that her research is being used as a masterclass by alcohol companies seeking to develop the most successful marketing strategies for products that appeal to young people.

We're past the entrees and on to the mains by the time I get round to asking the alcohol-industry executive about the incident we both know I'm going to bring up. I'm reminded of what my colleague Steve Butcher said about getting the most out of contacts: ‘A drunk man says what a sober man thinks.' He's on his second glass of wine. Maybe I should order him another.

The incident has been a prickly point between us for some years. I saw it as proof that the alcohol industry deliberately targets young people; he said it was a beat-up. It was the winter of 2007, and public concern over teenage binge drinking was growing. Figures showed that consumption was up, driven by a spike in pre-mixed spirits. With their bright colours and sweet taste, alcopops were clearly designed to appeal to young drinkers, health gurus claimed. Alcohol companies denied it, and said they were predominantly drunk by men over 25 who liked bourbon-, rum-, and whisky-based pre-mixed spirits.

Then I got a scoop they couldn't argue with. In an extraordinarily frank interview, a marketing executive behind a leading vodka brand told me that cheap, sugary drinks packaged in bright colours were the best way to start young people drinking from an early age. Mat Baxter from Naked Communications, the media agency that marketed the vodka-and-citrus drink Absolut Cut, said the market for pre-mixed spirits — apparently known in the industry as the ‘binge drinker' category — was booming. Super-strength versions were particularly popular because they ‘get young people drunk faster'. He told me: ‘It's one of the few drinks where you don't necessarily know you're drinking alcohol, and that's a conscious effort to make those drinks more appealing to young people. The drinks are very much about masking the alcohol taste. When you're young, your palate is tuned for sugary drinks.' He went on to say that drinks with higher alcohol content dominated the pre-mixed spirits market because they appealed to budget-conscious youngsters, who could buy three 7 per cent drinks and get just as drunk as they would if they bought five drinks at 5.5 per cent. It was the first time anyone in the industry had admitted that young people were deliberately being targeted, and health experts were apoplectic. They said that this whistleblower had exposed the grubby truth about an industry intent on encouraging alcohol abuse from an early age. Nobody from the spirits company or the industry body that represented them returned my calls.

My lunch guest dismisses the incident. He says that Baxter wasn't an industry insider; he was an external marketing flack whose comments were his own and not informed by fact. He doubts that Baxter had ever attended a product design meeting or read any consumer feedback, and believes that Baxter's interview with me was part of a crude publicity stunt. Baxter stopped taking my calls after the furore, so I guess we'll never know what he was thinking. But we do know this: whatever the industry's intention, kids are fond of alcopops. A month after the incident, I obtained previously unreleased figures that showed 14- to 19-year-olds at high risk of injury or death through binge drinking preferred pre-mixed alcopops over other drinks. Almost 78 per cent of girls and 74 per cent of boys at risk of short-term harm — of being injured or assaulted, blacking out, overdosing, or dying by drinking six to 11 drinks in one sitting — said that they preferred the pre-mixed spirits over other drinks. Beer was almost as popular with boys, but for girls alcopops were favoured over beer and wine.

It was hardly a surprise. While I know some people my age who drink bourbon and Coke in cans, I can't think of many over the age of 25 who drinks those sickly-sweet fruity drinks.

My lunch guest defends alcopops, saying it's a term that covers both the fruit-flavoured drinks and the cola drinks, and that many adults like the taste and convenience of pre-mixed drinks. As adults, they're entitled to choose these products — and what's the difference between a bottle of spirits, and mixers from the supermarket? Besides, how is the industry to stop teenagers from drinking, when the biggest suppliers of alcohol to underage drinkers are parents?

There were no alcopops to sweeten the revolting taste of alcohol when I started drinking — which probably explains why my friends and I resorted to drinking straight martini (the sweetest drink we could find) as if it were lemonade. Perhaps that suggests kids who want to get drunk will find a way, whatever's on the market. Still, I wonder if making booze more appealing and accessible to young people has encouraged some to drink at an earlier age than they might have if their only option was to put sugar in their beer and swig it through a straw with two fingers pinched over their nose.

As my lunch with a man who is part of the same industry I worked in for more than a decade draws to a close, I'm left pondering our collective role in the social fallout from the nation's alcohol problem. Intentionally or not, we have both fostered it, him through marketing booze to consumers, and me through serving punters in bars. And as clamour grows over how to tackle an epidemic of binge drinking, the industry, willingly or otherwise, is changing. In Melbourne, a freeze on late-night licences means that no new bars, pubs, or nightclubs opening after 1.00 a.m. will be allowed in the city's popular drinking areas until at least the middle of 2013. Across Victoria, all-night bottle shops have had their hours slashed, and the director of liquor licensing now has powers to ban bars from offering cheap-drink promotions that encourage reckless drinking. Fifteen such promotions have been banned since 2009. Nationally, taxes have been raised on alcopops, and some alcohol companies have stopped producing super-strength brands in response to concerns over binge drinking.

The impact of these changes remains to be seen. There's some evidence to suggest that all the alcopops tax achieved was to shift young drinkers to buying bottles of spirits that they mix themselves, arguably a more risky practice than consuming pre-mixed drinks. As Robin Room told me, when it comes to policies that will exact real change in our drinking culture, what works isn't popular and what's popular doesn't work. It might protect problem drinkers to set a minimum price for alcohol, or to introduce a volumetric tax (where the most potent drinks cost more), but the average punter's not going to be impressed when the price of their beer or wine is suddenly hiked up. And when you consider the $5.8 billion in alcohol taxes pouring into the government's coffers each year, you also have to wonder if perhaps some of our leaders think that encouraging people to drink less is not necessarily in the national interest. In a nation bathed in booze, it will be a brave government that tries to pull the plug.