Doctors, government departments and the Soul City NGO have proposed stricter legislation around alcohol use.
The Mail and Guardian, Soul City and SAfm hosted a Critical Thinking Forum in Johannesburg on Tuesday night to discuss whether South Africa needed a comprehensive alcohol policy.
The Medical Research Council’s Dr Neo Morojele and Sebastian Van As, a professor from the Children’s Red Cross hospital’s trauma unit, among others, took part in the forum, that was broadcast live on SAfm.
They fielded questions from callers and the audience in a robust discussion on whether tightening policy would change South Africa’s culture of heavy drinking. But Adrian Botha, from the Industry Association for Responsible Alcohol use, said industry players had been excluded from the debate.
The World Health 2011 Global Status Report on Health and Alcohol rated South Africa as one of the top five countries that showed ‘the most risky pattern of drinking”.
Van As said former president Nelson Mandela had addressed the societal problems caused by alcohol, blaming alcohol for the high levels of HIV, crime and violence in his first address to Parliament. He said it was therefore time the country found ways to reduce the high level of harmful drinking. All South Africans wanted less crime and violence, he said, adding that ‘more than 70% of violent crime was exacerbated by the consumption of alcohol”.
Morojele warned that drinking among school pupils was increasing. She urged the government to intervene, saying, “Drinking doesn’t have to be part our culture.”
Soul City’s advocacy manager Savera Kalideen said that national, provincial and local government sometimes had different laws to deal with the sale or supply of alcohol. Kalideen said while a national law may prohibit a shebeen from operating near a school, this could be contradicted by a municipal by-law.
The Department of Social Development’s Zane Dangor said that the government and his department were now looking at ways to reduce harmful drinking. He added that alcohol abuse was the problem, rather than responsible drinking.
Nanny state
Radio listeners and the audience urged South Africans to take responsibility for their drinking, saying consumers needed to make their own choices rather than being limited by a ‘nanny state”.
Professor Melvyn Freeman, the Department of Health’s manager for non-communicable diseases, countered that alcohol was a harmful drug and could not be approached in the same way as other consumer goods.
Freeman said health problems in South Africa fell into four areas: HIV/Aids and TB, maternal and child health, non-communicable diseases and violence-related injury. He said that alcohol added to the ‘disease burden” in each of the four areas. He hoped that a comprehensive policy could reduce alcohol abuse and its associated health problems.
Soul City suggested that money from the further taxing of alcohol manufacturers and sellers could be used to mitigate the effects of drinking, and would remove the burden from the taxpayer.
Cost and contribution
Professor Charles Parry from the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Unit agreed, saying a 1% levy on alcohol manufacturers would raise more than R400-million. He said the money could be used by an independent body to mitigate the effects of alcohol abuse. Parry said that after 20 years of debating the issue of alcohol abuse, he felt more self-regulation by the alcohol industry was needed. But Botha said that constant referrals to the high cost of alcohol in society failed to include the fact that “the industry’s economic contribution to the country, which includes government tax collected in 2009/2010 of R34,73-billion and value-added GDP of R73,29-billion|.
The Department of Trade and Industry’s Thezi Mabuza said while it monitored alcohol sales by 22 000 registered outlets, there were about 200 000 outlets that were not registered. Mabuza said that addressing the backlog was not DTI’s responsibility alone and the police also needed to deal with the issue.
Morojelo, Van As and Freeman argued that a better policy was needed to deal with the supply, use and sale of alcohol, but little had been agreed upon by the end of the evening.
Dangor said the government was studying other countries’ approaches to drinking laws and was looking at how restrictive alcohol laws in France had decreased drinking there.
Yussuf Saloojee, from the National Council Against Smoking, said that anti-smoking laws had been effective, which might also be the case if there were stricter laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol. He said anti-smoking laws had stopped advertising and reduced the glamour associated with puffing on a cigarette. By doing this, ‘smokers in South Africa had decreased from 35% to 22% of the population”, he said.
He said if a new alcohol policy increased the expense of drinking, reduced the supply and took away the social acceptability and glamour of drinking, perhaps levels of alcohol abuse would decrease.