EFF joins battle against alcohol abuse

For more than 25 years, Professor Charles Parry has tried to persuade South Africa’s legislators to take a harder line against alcohol.

“We just haven’t got our act together,” says Parry, who heads the SA Medical Research Council’s Tobacco and Other Drug Research Unit.

“Many of us use alcohol, so we talk about it but don’t do anything.”

Around 170 people die of alcohol-related causes every day in South Africa and 60% of those who die are from poor communities, according to research published in June 2018 by Parry and others in the journal BMC Medicine.

Parry first presented a plan to address the harmful effects of alcohol to then Health Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in 1996. Ten years later, he dusted off the presentation and tried again, but his plan had little traction with the health ministry despite the massive social cost we pay for being the 19th heaviest drinking nation in the world.

But last week, an unexpected ally joined Parry: EFF Member of Parliament Ntombovuyo Mente. The Government Gazette last Thursday published Mente’s intention to introduce a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament aimed at having alcohol advertisements banned.

“Young people in particular are being socialised into accepting alcohol use and abuse as an inalienable part of their existence,” according to the Gazette’s summary of her bill.

The EFF’s Gumani Tshimomola confirmed that Mente “has just notified the Speaker that she intends to introduce a Private Member’s Bill which will allow for a complete ban on alcohol advertisements”. He concluded that, although the move may not be popular, it is “necessary because of the effect of alcohol on young people”, the EFF’s main constituency.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi tried to introduce a ban on the marketing of alcohol in 2013, but failed to win the support of his Cabinet colleagues. His Bill was not even published for public comment.

Heavy drinking

While about half of South African men and one in five women admit to drinking alcohol, about a quarter of drinkers down five or more drinks per session. In Tshwane, one-fifth of drinkers consumed more than 80% of all alcohol sold, while in Gauteng more than half of drinkers drank heavily (eight or more drinks at a time for men and six of more for women), according to recent surveys.

If you visit a hospital’s casualty unit over a weekend, the effects of heavy drinking are apparent: car crashes, pedestrian deaths, rapes and assaults.

“South Africa’s national sport is drinking and stabbing one another,” a Cuban doctor once told me, while stitching up a young man at Kimberley Hospital who had been stabbed by a friend in a drunken argument.

A large proportion of drinkers — some estimate around a quarter — generally drink until they are utterly drunk.

Parry says that the size of beer bottles has an impact on heavy drinking: “In 2017, one-litre bottles of beer were introduced and the 440ml bottles were replaced by 500ml containers. People have started to think that the one litre bottles are one drink, when it is three or four.”

Another problem is that about 70% of liquor outlets are unlicenced shebeens. These shebeens are an important source of income in impoverished communities, but are unregulated and many allow underage drinking, stay open until all hours and are the sites of violence in communities.

Some solutions Parry says are worth considering include:

• Increasing the drinking age to 19 to exclude most school learners;


• Decreasing the legal limit of alcohol allowed for driving from 0.05g/100ml of blood to 0.02g/100ml — about enough to allow you to take medicine with alcohol in it;


• Regulating container size;


• Increasing taxes “but not too much to drive alcohol underground”;


• Banning alcohol advertising.