New laws on alcohol won't reduce drinking

There are champions for every strategy about the way society should manage alcohol, (and drugs, crime, road deaths, domestic violence and rape - whatever ills social scientists and legislators try to address).

They all have statistics to substantiate their position. As alcohol has been available for an extensive period of human history, many of these theories have been put to the test. Prohibition's singular lack of success should long ago have disposed of it as a possible solution.

Despite this, political parties in SA grasp at it to meet the emotionally charged demands of their constituents.

No-one mentions the failure of drug prohibition to address substance abuse (they also don't talk of banning cars because of the carnage on the roads, or outlawing sex - except solely for procreative purposes between consenting adults - as a means of managing the high incidence of rape). They know that neither of these proposals would gain any traction.

They are equally aware that those of their constituents for whom prohibition has real appeal are incapable of correlating its inability to address the drug trade with its certain failure to manage alcohol abuse.

In short, they play to the voters with a cynicism that does little credit to what is left of our democracy.

Provincial law and municipal law

Liquor law in SA is divided into areas that fall under a national liquor act - primarily production/importation and distribution - and retail (whether on-site or off-site consumption), which the provinces are mandated to manage.

Provincial governments can, and have, drafted legislation that delegates the finer regulations of retail (such as trading hours) to the cities and towns within their provinces. If a municipality fails to act on these rights, provincial law becomes the default.

Last year, on 1 April, the Democratic Alliance (DA) government in the Western Cape promulgated a new liquor act.

The City of Cape Town has just implemented the bylaws, which fall within its competence in terms of this legislation.

Arising from this act is a regulation relating to the amount of liquor you can buy, transport or hold at any one time without the permission of the chairman of the provincial liquor tribunal.

The magical volume is 150 litres. If you are planning a party or a wedding, you need to apply for the requisite authority. So, it turns out, must the vendor. You must also have the liquor tribunal chairman's permission if you happen to have 17 or more cases of wine in your cellar at home - on the off-chance the police come by to check.

You don't need to be an expert on bureaucracy in SA to know that if every time a purchase of 17 or more cases of liquor is about to take place, two separate authorisations must be granted by the liquor board, it is never going to happen.

Idiotic, unworkable and impractical though this is, it is no less prohibitionist than the proposal contained in Gauteng's new draft legislation prohibiting all liquor sales (on-site and off-site consumption) on Sundays. This means that if you are sitting down to lunch at the Saxon, the Hyatt, Mastrantonio or The Fishmonger for a Sunday lunch, you will either have had to remember to bring your own bottle (tricky if you're an international visitor) or you can jump-start your diabetes with a litre of Coke.

When you encounter stupidity on such a cosmic scale, it is difficult to divine the law makers' intentions.

Until the early 1960s, the apartheid government applied a system of total prohibition for black consumers.

Accordingly, licensees were required to keep a liquor book so that the liquor squad could track purchases in excess of whatever was deemed "reasonable".

This was used to determine if the buyer was actually a runner or shebeen operator.

Maximum amount of alcohol is 150 litres

Is it possible that the DA has drawn its inspiration from this glorious moment in our country's past and decided that anyone who possesses more than 150 litres of unfortified table wine is the vinous equivalent of a drug dealer? Would that mean that any family with four cars parked in its driveway should apply for a licence as a second-hand car dealer? And if you have a well-stocked larder, with crates of canned tomatoes and pasta, you should be licensed as a grocer or a restaurateur?

The African National Congress's (ANC's) Gauteng proposal, which also harks back to the era of the National Party government and the bad old days of the Sunday Observance Act, implies that the Christian Sabbath and the consumption of alcohol are incompatible. Tell that to the team that drafted the Bible, a text whose views on wine clearly do not tally with the sanctimonious rubbish that is presently up for consideration from the Gauteng legislature.

The ban on all Sunday trading in the hardline days of the Calvinist state meant that the doors of liquor stores were kept firmly shut after 1pm on Saturdays.

Sunday prohibition - except in communities (rather than whole provinces), which for religious or cultural reasons have exercised their rights to amend trading hours - is nothing more than a red herring. There are, in fact, fewer alcohol-related accidents on the Christian Sabbath than there are on other days of the week.

The Gauteng proposal is an equally crass attempt to buy votes from the prohibitionist lobby. The fact that it will achieve no useful purpose and will undoubtedly cost jobs in the hospitality sector (and gratuity income to serving staff) means nothing to those who have proposed it.

Prohibition is important especially among members of the ANC Women's League, while serving staff in restaurants (who are often male and from neighbouring states) are not their constituents.

The Global Commission for Drug Policy, whose members included former US secretary of state George Shultz, former United Nations (UN) secretary-general Kofi Annan, former UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour, the former chairman of President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Paul Volcker, and Richard Branson, studied international drug policy as implemented over the past 50 years.

Its conclusion, in Branson's words: "Just as prohibition of alcohol failed in the US in the 1920s, the war on drugs has failed globally. Over the past 50 years, more than US$1trn has been spent fighting this battle, and all we have to show for it is increased drug use, overflowing jails, billions of pounds and dollars of taxpayers' money wasted, and thriving crime syndicates."

What is required is not more unworkable laws, especially if their approach is prohibitionist - with a worldwide 100% record of failure.

We just need proper policing: there is enough legislation on our statute books to deal with alcohol abuse.

What is missing is the political will to deal with the much bigger issue of a useless and incompetent police force.

Source: Business Day via I-Net Bridge