Guyon Espiner on booze

Guyon Espiner has written a critical book - a very critical book - about booze called The Drinking Game. It's about the place of alcohol in New Zealand society and it draws heavily on his own experiences.

There’s the big problem, right there. Espiner admits he was a problem drinker. The reader is bombarded with anecdotes about the times he drank to excess. There’s an almost boastful tone to some of these stories.

But most people who drink are not problem drinkers, as Espiner admits, and at the end of his book I was left wondering what the point was.

The Drinking Game purports to be a critical analysis, but a self-confessed problem drinker is no more capable of writing a balanced book about alcohol than a vegan is capable of writing a balanced book about the meat industry, or an atheist about the Catholic Church.

The entire book is coloured by Espiner’s own experiences, but they’re not typical. And because they’re not typical, you have to ask what relevance they have to people who are able to drink without getting blotto (which, at the risk of labouring a point, means most of the population).

His revelation that he has Type 1 diabetes, which finally provided the incentive he needed to give up drinking, makes him even more atypical. Yet he persists with the theme that his own experiences are somehow applicable to everyone.

Espiner has burrowed deeply into the academic literature, of which there’s no shortage. Almost all of it is hostile to alcohol (and to capitalism, I suspect), but ignores the ability of most people to drink without harming themselves or those around them. He relates cautionary tales about alcoholics, but again misses the point that alcoholics make up only a small minority of drinkers.

He lets himself down in places with sloppy research. He writes that Mac’s Brewery was founded in Dunedin (wrong; it was Nelson) and that Claytons was a zero-alcohol beer (it was non-alcoholic, but it wasn’t a beer). He even manages to place Bagram air force base in the wrong country despite having been there himself. Nit-picking readers might wonder what else he got wrong.

Like the finger-wagging academics he approvingly quotes, he rails against the supposedly malign influence of the booze barons and their hold over weak or venal politicians. If Espiner is to be believed, they wield an almost mystical power (an impression likely to be reinforced by the overwhelming vote in Parliament this week against Chloe Swarbrick's bill that would have banned alcohol sponsorship and advertising in sport). 

He also bewails the fact that alcohol has been “normalised”. But alcohol is normal, and has been for millennia, as Espiner acknowledges. He even grudgingly acknowledges alcohol’s benefits as an agent of social bonding and creativity: “Humans need to drink alcohol to be human,” he writes. Then he swiftly moves on, presumably because that bit doesn’t align with his overall theme.  

It’s possible to nod in agreement with some of Espiner’s points. Yes, New Zealand’s liquor laws did lurch from one extreme to another, to the point where many would agree there are now far too many outlets and licensing hours are ridiculously loose. Even people in the hospitality business say so.

But Espiner doesn’t give due credit to the early stages of that liberalisation process, which made social drinking immeasurably more civilised and inclusive than it used to be. He’s too young to remember the scungy, men-only public bars of the 1960s and 70s and the days when only the rich could afford to patronise the tiny number of restaurants that were permitted to serve wine.

Espiner can be an entertaining writer, though he tends to be rather too fascinated by himself. He’s also a capable journalist who has recently been lauded, justifiably, for his investigative work exposing the political lobbying racket. But there’s no more zealous crusader than the reformed sinner, and there’s an almost evangelical tone to his book that could be summarised as: “I gave up drinking! You should too!” But most people don’t need to.

Incidentally, the cover of Espiner's book carries a melodramatic plug ("This is real, it is raw, and it lays out the truth about booze") from his friend Patrick Gower, who made a documentary last year in which he too admitted a drinking problem. And you might wonder about the timing of a recent Morning Report item in which Corin Dann - who with his wife, Living Sober website manager Lotta Dann, is acknowledged in Espiner's book as a key source of advice and support - interviewed anti-alcohol activist Boyd Swinburn about the access to politicians enjoyed by liquor industry lobbyists, which Espiner had highlighted in his RNZ series. It all starts to look decidedly clubby. 

In the final analysis, The Drinking Game repackages a familiar message, albeit through a personal lens: liquor is too widely available, it’s too cheap, it’s advertised too much and politicians are incapable of resisting lobbying pressure from the industry. And of course booze is hazardous, at least for people who can’t control their intake.

We’ve heard all this before, ad nauseam. But Espiner isn’t entirely clear about what he thinks should be done about it, and in the end he gets us no closer to solving the old conundrum: should the majority of people who drink safely and responsibly be penalised because of the unfortunate things that happen to the minority who don’t?

(Disclosure: In a past life I was a wine writer, in which capacity I was provided with free wine for review purposes. I'm aware that in the eyes of some neo-wowsers in academia, that made me complicit in the liquor industry's attempt to enslave the population.)

 The Drinking Game, published by Allen and Unwin, $36.99.