Ian Hickie, Chris Middendorp, prohibition, and the demon drink

(Above: sorry, but before proceeding, you have to print off the form above and sign it. It's the rules, and I'd also like to see some ID. Anyone under nineteen isn't up to the high level of debate expected on this site).

A flurry of floozies on loon pond today, and as usual, with the ghost of Stephen Conroy lurking over our shoulder, we turn to the subject of banning and prohibition things as the solution to all that ails us - and in particular, as the intertubes ban is still wreathed in mystery, what better than the banning of the demon drink.

Now coming from a family with an Irish engagement with alcohol, I have an ambivalent relationship with the demon drink. Apart from the difficulty of spelling the word with reliable consistency, a taste for the mood changer in all its forms cut a swathe through my family.

It was the way in the country in those days, and still is, though not quite the way it once was. My grandfather came back from fighting on the Somme, took to the grog and took to seeing pink elephants in the hallway. An uncle developed a taste for metho. Life for my father revolved around the social interactions to be found in the pub, and staggering home drunk to eat the burnt roast deliberately stashed in the oven so it might turn black at the edges. And so on and so forth.

I was exposed at an early age, and developed a taste which has resulted in constant ambivalence, what you might call wake in fright moments.

As well as plenty of under-age drinking in pubs and binge drinking at parties, and an early exposure to ouzo from a bottle in the kitchen cupboard of a Greek friend (which helped me swear off spirits for life), everywhere you looked there was grog, and the drinking of it was as natural as breathing. The notion that somehow it's worse these days, and the violence with it, is the first of the lies we tell our children.

The notion that was only men was another, unless the milk and rum my grandmother took upon retiring 'for medicinal purposes' was indeed a genuine prescription from the local doctor.

And with the drink being everywhere, in every pore of society, if you didn't understand it, and control it, and the addiction took hold, you went under.

In this context, delivering long screeds of scientific guff explaining the damage alcohol can do to the body, the brain, the mind and the soul is a trifle academic. You just have to look around to see the wreckage.

And yet - just as prohibition in America was a profound failure - so the desire to ban the stuff or raise the legal age of drinking is a complete and futile furphy.

Cue Ian Hickie with We must raise the legal age of drinking to 19.

So we can follow the American model and have kids drive to Mexico for a bout of binge drinking? Well I guess driving to New Zealand might be tricky, so we might just have to settle for a walk out to the drinks fridge, and the sneaking of a few, or hiring an older mate to supply a healthy swag of 'packaged goods'.

I guess the move would help movie-makers. How many plot lines have exploited teenagers desires to see themselves involved in getting illegal 'packaged goods', along with sex and drugs, not to mention adults wanting to see nostalgic memories of their teen years doing the same?

Not to mention prohibition gangster movies, or movies like The Hangover, which skew around wild nights that lead to deja vu. Sure they used drugs as the excuse for the black out, but you mean a night in Vegas without wild drinking is the way to go? Try spending new year's eve in New Orleans and then tell me about how having a drink at lunch time in California brands you as an alcoholic. Everywhere the drink is rife, and the ambivalence with it.

Hickie is of course an academic, and seems to operate in the delusionary world where saying something somehow suddenly makes it so. By lifting the age of illegal drinking to 19, suddenly under age drinking would vanish. As if ...

I started regular drinking in pubs at the age of 16 in a discreet 'lounge' designed for rural sophisticates. I don't recommend it to anyone, and if I hadn't grown up in a culture so approving and so awash with alcohol, I possibly wouldn't have done it. But to do it, I had to break the law of the time, and there were plenty to help, who either considered the law an ass, or had financial motivations to do it, and if you think any of that will change if you add another year to the current 'ban on teenage drinking' then you must be an academic.

One of the strongest motivations for my own experimentation? People said you shouldn't do it, and so off I went to prove that I could.

Hickie has all the right science behind him:

New research in neuro-science tells us that the brain continues to develop right through until the late teenage and early adult period. In fact, particularly in young men, it may not reach adult maturity till the mid-20s.

It is the frontal part of the brain that regulates complex decision making, forward planning and inhibition of impulsive behaviours that is undergoing final development at this age.

One of the most toxic things that a young brain can encounter is a high level of blood alcohol.

Well whose to argue with that? And he makes it all sound so simple:

The Prime Minister and the Health Minister are out touring the country and asking for serious health reform proposals, particularly in the areas of preventative and youth health.

While the evidence related to the benefits that could be derived from lifting the drinking age are clear, to date, there has been little political stomach for the task.

It is clear to those of us in health and social policy that simply lifting the age to 19 would break the current impasse and deliver immediate benefits.

And it would also help enhance a strong underground culture with an unhealthy fixation on illegal booze. As if under nineteens are the real or only problem in a culture awash with alcohol.

Just like Senator Conroy, who thinks banning pornography will make it go away and deliver Australia a clean healthy intertubes, Hickie thinks a magic wave of the wand will end schoolies' week and kids developing a taste for binge drinking:

The benefits would be most direct for those in their last year of school or their first year of university or employment. However, the benefits would also extend to a younger group since there is a clear relationship between the legal drinking age and first use of alcohol.

If banning grog would stop the drinking of grog, rather than just driving it underground.

Given that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd meets all the premiers on December 7 to discuss health reform, our national government has an ideal opportunity to put a simple clear proposal on the national agenda.

Rather than focusing on more advertising, education and marketing, let's do something that will have real impact.

Lift the age to 19 and make a real difference now.

Let's not worry about education? Or the role breweries play in Australia's sporting life? Or a country intoxicated with the demon drink, ever since the Rum rebellion? Better to criminalize behaviour rather than delete commercials for grog from sporting events, or - gasp - tackle the purveyors of grog because they have the political clout?

Make a real difference? Lordy, no wonder those influencing health and social policies regularly miss the mark.

Well the few comments Hickie inspired left no doubt that his proposal was dead before it left the starting gates.

But it took Chris Middendorp, in Through a glass, darkly, to nail the futility of the Hickie heresy in cleverer ways than I could manage (perhaps because of the early age at which I started drinking and the consequent loss of brain cells, which made me dumb as a stick):

Speaking of winners and losers, is it a coincidence that sport-transfixed Melbourne is as famous for its drunken altercations as it is for its events? The football and racing seasons are virtually synonymous with tragic drinking, sexual assaults and punch-ups. Ambulance drivers I've met absolutely dread some of our local sporting shrines.

Some events, by contrast, are less likely to engender misfortune. Few people leave a string quartet recital to get pissed and kick in a few heads. Is there a lesson here?

Well yes there is. And I wished I'd made that point when that fatuous dork Tim Dick rabbited on about the evils of classical music There's just no sound argument for being hooked on classics. You see fatuous Dick, string quartets save you from a life of alcoholism!

Middendorp trawls through all the arguments devised by prohibitionists - the zero tolerance furphy, the notion that public drunkenness and street violence comes from nowhere, or is devised by young people for their own amusement, like some fresh and new form of indulgence miraculously invented last week.

About the only notion that I find problematic is that it's somehow related to Anglo Celtic culture. Try a walk in the street in Moscow and the smell of vodka in the air is everywhere, at least in a metaphorical sense. But Middendrop does offer up one profound insight, which to Hickie would probably sound like gibberish, but which helps explain why Hickie will never begin to have a clue about the problems of alcohol:

I am haunted by an insight attributed to Henry Lawson. He said that drinking was a man's way of crying. If so, this self-punishing pastime has evolved into a wretched penalisation of others. You can't help asking, if Lawson was right, why are we so sad?

Lawson, that national icon, was of course a notorious drunk (there's some sad memories of him and his bouts of drinking here in poems by Mary Gilmore - golly the full to overflowing intertubes is getting full of good stuff, well done Sydney uni).

Lawson was a classic alcoholic, and you can read what you will into his poem One Hundred and Three, including these lines:

The brute is a brute, and a kind man kind, and the strong heart does not fail—
A crawler’s a crawler everywhere, but a man is a man in gaol!
For forced ‘desertion’ or drunkenness, or a law’s illegal debt,
While never a man who was a man was ‘reformed’ by punishment yet.

The champagne lady comes home from the course in charge of the criminal swell—
They carry her in from the motor car to the lift in the Grand Hotel.
But armed with the savage Habituals Act they are waiting for you and me,
And the drums, they are beating loud and near. (Keep step, One Hundred and Three!)

The clever scoundrels are all outside, and the moneyless mugs in gaol—
Men do twelve months for a mad wife’s lies or Life for a strumpet’s tale.
If the people knew what the warders know, and felt as the prisoners feel—
If the people knew, they would storm their gaols as they stormed the old Bastile.

And the cackling, screaming half-human hens who were never mothers nor wives
Would send their sisters to such a hell for the term of their natural lives,
Where laws are made in a Female Fit in the Land of the Crazy Fad,
And drunkards in judgment on drunkards sit and the mad condemn the mad.

Needless to add that Lawson had trouble with women, along with his trouble with drink.

But he did understand that banning or locking up isn't the solution, because what Hickie proposes involves policing and prosecutions and illegality and a spiraling whirl and whorl of crime, and it just doesn't work.

In a society where alcohol and alcoholism is rampant, raising the age to nineteen is just pissing into the wind.

I know now why my grandfather was sad. Being a machine gunner on the Somme will do that to you, and explain why before the war the drinking was mild and rare, and afterwards demonic and hateful.

But why are the rest of us so sad, and we do we think our sadness doesn't affect or influence our children?

Instead of explaining to children why alcohol and drinking is bad and should be delayed or banned or prohibited, no doubt while taking a swig of chardonnay over dinner, why not tip the rest of the bottle down the sink?

Hard? Well there's always a string quartet playing somewhere near you ...

(Below: more images from a quaint collection at Nausicaa).