Monday, June 22, 2020

Lotta Dann and the liquor debate


I was name-checked (I believe that’s the fashionable term) by Kim Hill on Saturday morning during a discussion about alcohol. (For the record, I don’t normally listen to Hill, but a friend texted me to say my name had come up during an interview. Naturally I later accessed her show via the RNZ website, praying she had defamed me and that I might enjoy a comfortable retirement on the proceeds. Sadly, the reference wasn’t legally actionable.)

Hill’s guest was Lotta Dann, who has written a book called The Wine O’Clock Myth. Dann is a recovering alcoholic who had her last drink eight years ago and now has a website, Living Sober, that offers encouragement and support for women with a drinking problem. In her book, which was also the subject of a feature story in Stuff’s YW magazine the previous weekend, she criticises the “normalisation” of alcohol and the liquor industry’s use of advertising that portrays drinking as glamorous and sophisticated. According to Dann, getting drunk with the girls can start out as an enjoyable social habit but end up leading women into some dark places. All of which I know to be true.

Early in the interview, Hill chimed in: “I can hear Karl du Fresne on the line as I speak, insisting that wine is a civilised beverage and that it’s only the outliers who make it a problem, and that the liquor industry should not be regulated for the sake of a few people who can’t take their booze.” This was probably intended as a dig, Hill and I not being mutual admirers, but it’s not a wholly inaccurate summation of the many columns I’ve written over the years about alcohol and the endless debate about how tightly it should be controlled.

Briefly restated, my position is that most New Zealand drinkers do consume alcohol moderately and responsibly. Our per capita liquor consumption is not high by international standards. Most of us are perfectly capable of enjoying a few drinks without causing mayhem on the roads, bashing our partners and kids or becoming alcoholics. But it’s pointless to deny (and I never have) that alcohol is a potentially dangerous and addictive drug that can cause serious social harm. The debate is all about where to strike the difficult regulatory balance between benefit and harm. 

For decades we had an extremely strict, religiously influenced regulatory regime that placed tight controls on liquor consumption and produced perverse, counter-productive consequences such as the notorious six o’clock swill and the advent of the suburban booze barn. From the 1970s onwards, the trend was one of gradual liberalisation.  It would be dishonest to pretend it hasn’t produced some undesirable outcomes, such as the boom in consumption of RTDS by young women and the proliferation of cheap  liquor outlets, but I would argue that New Zealanders are far more civilised drinkers now than they were 50 years ago.

The debate, still, is about how far governments should go to protect the minority of problem drinkers by regulating alcohol – through advertising rules, the legal drinking age, pricing mechanisms and so forth – without unfairly penalising the majority of people who drink moderately and responsibly. We still haven’t got the balance quite right and may never do, but we can't allow alcohol policy to be dictated by a noisy coterie of state-funded wowsers, moralists and control freaks in the bureaucracy and academia who bombard us with anti-alcohol propaganda, don’t believe New Zealanders can be trusted to make responsible choices about drinking and are also, I suspect, fundamentally hostile to capitalism.

But back to Lotta Dann. She seemed to agree with my proposition that alcohol causes no harm to people who can control their consumption. Her concern, which I totally understand, is for those people who can’t. But she went on to say: “Our [liquor] environment only pushes one side and doesn’t acknowledge there’s a dark side to this addictive drug”. I dispute that. No one who reads newspapers, watches TV or listens to the radio can fail to be aware of the shrill warnings constantly emanating from the neo-wowser lobby. The question is whether alcohol policy should be predicated on the harm it does to a minority without proper regard to the benefits enjoyed by the majority. It’s always going to be tricky.

As an aside, I know many people who, like Dann, have overcome their addiction to alcohol. They include some of my oldest and closest friends. I have huge respect for them. But at the same time, I wonder whether recovering alcoholics are necessarily the best people to determine what is best for society as a whole when it comes to liquor issues, since their perspective is likely to be coloured by their own problematic relationship with drink. Dann raises valid concerns and appears to have helped a lot of women. That can only be good. But someone who has personally struggled with alcoholism has seen the worst consequences of alcohol consumption, so may not be the most objective authority.

The Wine O’Clock Myth: The truth you need to know about women and alcohol, is out now.



7 comments:

  1. A welcome return of this item Karl, good upon you.

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  4. One of the better decisions of my adult life was to ban Kim Hill (or whatever her real name is) from my home. All her guests and agendas leant dangerously to a) the Left, b) her self-absorption, c) her bias, and d) her vitriolic attacks on views with which she disagreed to one extent or another. All of which are in contradiction of RNZ’s charter that is supposed to oversee and enforce balance.

    Was it any wonder then that potential guests (eg. perhaps yourself Karl) who might otherwise be of interest to listeners, but whose views were (and are) diametrically opposed to those held by Hill and the programme’s producer, declined to be interviewed. Winston Peters is but one example.

    As for alcoholism, it would be unfortunate should this column become a confessional, but I empathise with those who have battled the bottle. I still agree with Karl’s repeated assertions that most NZers drink moderately, and use alcohol as a means of social pleasure, relaxation and entertainment, little of which are to their detriment. Yam Seng!

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  5. Hughvane,
    Kim Hill is her real name, at least as far as I'm aware. For the record, I've never been invited to take part in her programme and would neither expect nor want to be.

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  6. @Karl - I have an extraordinary audio memory of a Morning Report episode of yesteryear when Geoff Robinson was teamed with Maggie Barry, the latter of whom was about to relinquish her role. As she said her farewells, she mentioned her replacement (namely Kim Hill), "whose real name is .... Peters".

    Something for you to get your journalistic teeth into?

    Absolute empathy with your mind not to be interviewed by KH. Check with Jeffrey Archer some time.

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  7. Re Kim Hill...I recall she has publically remarked she chose 'Kim' when younger. She was named perhaps 'Fiona"? Unsure about the 'Hill' I've been listening to her a long time but these days I cherry-pick the interviews via podcast. I don't have to agree with her 'positions', and I prefer to think she doesn't push them like some of her RNZ peers. Some will disagree. I still regard her as one of their best. Fond memories of the Lord Archer interviews, while pinned to the feeding chair with a bub, insofar as it was an unmissable radio event. Re Dann...a sort of 'I'm back again' thing. She is a good speaker.

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