Let’s use an existing law to stop drinks firms targeting our children

DO you know what a rainbow is? Do you know that girls have been treated in the Sexual Assault Unit in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin with the amount of alcohol in their systems that is normally found in the morgue?

Do you know what a Wild Thing is? Or a Rodeo? Do you know what MLDAs are? Do you know that a doctor in Dublin told the Dáil recently that he treated a 15-year-old girl who was in a deep coma within an hour of drinking half a bottle of neat vodka? Have you ever heard of a Skoal Bandit? Do you know the connection between all these things? I don't want to pretend it's a simple or straightforward relationship.

President McAleese has recently highlighted our peculiar relationship with alcohol. There's no doubt in my mind that she was perfectly right to do so, and that she did it in a thought-provoking way. I have equally no doubt that it is a multi-faceted issue.

Many of us drank too much when we were younger. Few of us are in a position to judge or condemn anyone who has a difficult relationship with drink.

But what does astonish and horrify me is the fact that there are now drinks that have been manufactured with the sole and specific purpose of appealing to young people, of getting through their defences. They are marketed directly at young people. Incidentally, drinks marketing people never refer to young people directly in their meetings and video conferences. They refer to young people as MLDAs. It's short for "minimum legal drinking age" and it allows the marketing people to develop plans without thinking that their own teenage sons or daughters might be hooked by them. Using jargon is often a good way of fooling your conscience.

One of the most "successful" drinks aimed at young people its American manufacturers would be very upset if I said it was aimed at teenagers, so I'll let you be the judge of that is a product called Aftershock. The company that manufactures it calls it a "cordial" which is defined in my dictionary as "a stimulant or tonic".

Aftershock comes in a cool square bottle and pretty colours red, blue and green. Many barmen in Dublin, and presumably elsewhere, know how to make a rainbow with Aftershock. You do it by carefully pouring a shot of each colour into a tall glass. Drink it quickly and the colours will stay separate. Drink it quickly and you'll have had three shots of one of the strongest drinks on the market. Aftershock is 40 degrees of alcohol that's the same strength as neat whiskey, and stronger than vodka or gin. It's three times stronger than wine or beer.

It's one of the most popular "catch-up" drinks among young people if you want to get out of your mind quickly, there's a variety of ways you can do it with Aftershock. And they are helpful at pointing them out.

Not on the bottle, mind you. You won't find any indication on the bottle of what's inside. There's a website (www.shockingtimes.com) but even the website is not too informative about exactly what Aftershock is. It does tell you quite clearly how to drink it this incredibly strong drink. You pour it neat into a shot glass, "take it in one", and then take a deep breath.

And if that's not strong enough, the good people who manufacture it have ways of helping you along. There's a recipe for Wild Thing that's mixing Aftershock with one of the Irish cream drinks and a vanilla liqueur. Or Rodeo Aftershock and a shot of bourbon. The website, not surprisingly, recommends that you should "hold on tight".

Aftershock is only one of the drinks that are specifically aimed at very young people. Some of the others are not quite as strong, but are made very sweet to encourage addictive and easy drinking.

All of them make their own contribution to what is now an epidemic of under-age drinking, with deadly consequences. All of them make a lie of the claims of some drinks manufacturers that they believe in responsible drinking and marketing.

Dr Colman O'Leary, a consultant at the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, told the Oireachtas Committee on Health recently that crash drinking among the 12-to-15 age group was a major concern. He referred to the 15-year-old girl in a deep coma from neat vodka, and he went on to say that he would like to take pictures of these young people in a comatose state, having soiled themselves, and show them to themselves and their parents.

Dr Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital, told the Committee that 60% of females seen at the unit had alcohol taken. Many of them believed themselves to have been victims of the so-called "date rape" drug, rohypnol but it was seldom if ever found in the blood tests. What was found was enormous amounts of alcohol.

"The toxicology service has remarked to us that levels of alcohol in the samples they test for us are only seen in samples from one other source, the coroner's office," Dr Holohan added. This had not changed over the past decade, she said, but the pattern of alcohol consumption had.

"Spirits are consumed at home before going out. Mixed-sex groups of young teens drink in parks the boys beer and the girls undiluted spirits," she said.

Apparently, one of the reasons girls favour undiluted spirits is in the belief that they are less fattening. How big a worry is that when you end up in casualty? Dr Eamon Brazil of the Mater Hospital told the Committee that they had to deal with about 10 drunk patients a day.

Alcohol consumption accounted for up to a quarter of all A&E attendances at his hospital, he said.

Which brings me to Skoal Bandits. Skoal Bandits are a kind of chewing tobacco. They're a form of snuff, sold in sachets, and quite popular throughout Scandinavia. Like all chewing tobaccos, they are very strongly associated with mouth cancer.

In the mid-1980s, when Barry Desmond was minister for health, he discovered that Skoal Bandits were about to be launched on the Irish market.

He took the decision immediately that there was no good reason why a cancer-causing product not already legally here should be allowed into the market. And he banned it, simply, directly, using a provision of the 1947 Health Act.

That provision has never been used for any other purpose. I believe it should be used to ban alcoholic products that are specifically designed to hook very young people. They are a form of exploitation and abuse of young people, and the state has the power to end it.

I don't favour that form of compulsion as a rule. But everyone involved in dealing with the consequences knows that there is an age at which young people are especially vulnerable to exploitation. If we choose to ignore that fact, many of them won't survive their first experiments with the poison that alcohol can be.