Well-meaning alcohol group losing drink PR battle

Alcohol companies are in the business of shareholder value, like every other kind of company.

Which requires they sell more of their product every year.

This they do with sophistication, humour, creativity and relentless expenditure. By the time a young person in this country hits 21, they’ll have encountered, on average, 30,000 positive images of alcohol. Adding up to the cumulative proposition: Booze rocks.

In that context, the setting up of a drinks industry association to promote Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society (MEAS) sounds good. It also sounds like a contradiction in terms. To some, it might even sound like a smart move at a time when public concern about binge-drinking and the involvement of alcohol in socially-disruptive behaviours has resulted in restrictions on how much and where the alcohol companies can advertise and sponsor.

MEAS’s most recent move was to stage a conference addressed by anthropologist Anne Fox. Ms Fox advises the British army on drink. At the conference, she advocated letting teenagers have alcohol at home.

“It’s certainly proven,” she said, “that young people that grow up with alcohol as a non-magical, normalised part of life are much less prone to using alcohol in a destructive, binge-drinking rebellious way.”

Interesting way to weight a claim. “Non-magical, normalised part of life.”

Wonder exactly what that means? Makes one ponder about how magical and abnormal alcohol was in one’s own home life. I grew up in a home with a teetotal father. My sister was also teetotal.

My mother was not teetotal. She would rise to a chaste glass of Winter’s Tale sherry on celebration and bonfire nights. Ours was not the kind of home Ms Fox approves of.

It has not, however, left any of us with a “magical” view of alcohol.

Ms Fox’s nicely-phrased claim brought Dr Conor Farren, addiction psychiatrist at St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin, out of the woodwork. He didn’t like it. He REALLY didn’t like it. He rubbished the vague claim that alcohol at home made kids “much less prone” to drinking themselves stupid. Dr Farren’s research proves the opposite: the younger you start on booze, the more likely you are to get hooked on the stuff. In Canada in 2001, a study showed a sizeable proportion of those who experimented with alcohol by their mid-teens were addicted a decade later.

Dr Farren wasn’t alone in not liking Ms Fox’s familial approach to early alcohol introduction. Alcohol Action Ireland kept it simple: giving alcohol to anyone under 18 is illegal, so parents following her advice would be breaking the law, they said. Then a doctor who serves as clinical director of an addiction centre rowed in, discouraging parents from serving alcohol to their offspring until the kids hit their late teens or early 20s.

“The rule of thumb is, the later the better,” said Dr Stephen Rowen.

“Research has found that if you have your first drink before the age of 15, you are 10 times more likely to have a problem with alcohol than if you wait until 21 or older,” he said.

Now, you might think that Ms Fox was good and squelched by this point, but just in case she wasn’t, Professor Thomas Babor, whose day job is in the University of Connecticut, got in on the act, too, opining that countries with a heavy drinking culture (he didn’t actually say Ireland, but the guesswork is easy) have a particular responsibility to protect children from exposure to alcohol for as long as possible.

As a case study in counter-productive public relations, this raises a number of interesting questions. Starting with why the drinks industry would choose an anthropologist rather than a medical doctor. Nothing against anthropologists. Or against the drinks industry (some of my most fascinating clients are master brewers and distillers). But when an anthropologist warbles on about the ineffectiveness of anti-alcohol abuse advertising, (as did Ms Fox) that’s of roughly as much value as having an advertising executive give a lecture about anthropology. Particularly when this specific anthropologist made leaps of logic that could win her a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

She scorned shock/horror ads as being ineffective.

Ms Fox’s thesis seems to be that if you tell teenagers that something is risky and will rot their brains, they’ll leave scorch marks on the carpet rushing to get a hold of the risky item and have a go at rotting their brains with it. True.

Except that her alternative approach amounts to playing happy families over a few drinks while the parents explain what happens to the teenage brain when it encounters alcohol, the explanations calm and reasonable, rather than scary and horrific. This ignores the reality that most teenagers would rather go drink cider out of a bottle in a cesspit with pals than have a glass of vino at the kitchen table with parents giving reasoned lectures about the cognitive impact of alcohol.

Her bit of supportive anecdotal evidence is drawn from her own school years in France, where celebration days, presumably like Halloween, were marked by the provision of a jug of wine planted at the students’ table at mealtimes and, she says, ignored by many of them.

One has to wonder if Ms Fox shares her French boarding school experiences with the army guys she counsels about alcohol, and, if so, what precisely they gain from it.

One also has to wonder how MEAS could be naïve enough not to anticipate any journalist attending their conference would go searching for opposition to an approach which even a half-cynic might view as dodgy.

But then, determined naivete seems to characterise this worthy body’s approach. It boasts on its colourless, solemn website that it’s “operationally” independent from the drinks companies that set it up and sponsor it. Whatever that means.

Visit the lively colourful websites of its sponsor companies, however, and you can, at a click, download their ads as screensavers for your computer.

Thereby adding to the all-pervasive inundation of alcohol-pushing inputs contributing to our drinking culture.

Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society is a fine objective.

MEAS isn’t going to make it happen by importing anthropologists to promote early alcohol consumption at home, accompanied by parental lectures.