Higher Sobriety by Jill Stark

Author:Jill Stark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, SEL006000, SOC022000, SOC026000, HEA000000, PSY038000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’M HAVING LUNCH with a man who’s heard it all before. As a senior alcohol-industry executive, he’s grown accustomed to being called names; he’s had to develop a Teflon exterior. Health experts have accused his industry of being disease vectors, of trying to lure children into a lifetime of binge drinking, and of putting profits ahead of people. He stopped getting angry a long time ago. Now, he just seems tired.

We meet in one of Melbourne’s high-end restaurants — his choice, and on his tab. It’s a shame that I can’t join him in a glass of wine; the list of offerings is exquisite. Plus, I quite like the idea of getting sozzled with a corporate bigwig, whiling away the afternoon quaffing Moët & Chandon and Rémy Martin, safe in the knowledge that the bill is being picked up by the very industry charged with transforming me, and countless others, into binge-drinking reprobates. But my decadent fantasy will have to wait for another day. I order mineral water.

I’ve debated this man many times. He’s engaging and whip-smart. His response to claims against the industry is always considered and fair. He often shows a healthy degree of wariness in answering my questions, but today he seems more apprehensive than usual. In fact, he tells me that he does not want to be named in my book.

I start by asking him what he thought when he read the article about my history of binge drinking. He says he was surprised that someone who, he had presumed from my reporting, had a dim view of alcohol abuse would drink so much. ‘It’s a bit like a police reporter being caught shoplifting,’ he says. I laugh, and he seems to relax a bit. ‘I wouldn’t have said it changed the credibility of what you wrote because you’ve always been reasonably fair.’

It’s a generous concession from a man whose industry I have repeatedly hammered in the pages of The Age and The Sunday Age. While he’s in such a mood, I ask him to be completely frank. I know that he’s paid to represent the alcohol industry’s best interests, but just quietly, there must be times when he thinks, hang on, maybe my industry does fuel harmful drinking?

He doesn’t hesitate. ‘I don’t think it does now, and I don’t think it has done ever. The public-health lobby, like so many social-justice groups, see the industry as vastly more powerful and controlling than it actually is. We’re actually led by our customers far more than us leading them. We might bring out a new product, and if people like it, well, that’s great; it’s not some sort of Machiavellian plan to find new ways that people can drink more and more. We see what people want and we provide it for them. It’s not like we have magical means of saying, “Here, everyone drink more and drink quicker.”’

But drinking more we are. If market forces have played no part in our current binge-drinking culture, how did we get here? He puts it down to rapid social changes.

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