Over 20 years ago, when Charles Parry began urging government officials to get tougher on the alcohol industry, he heard some smug jibes from liquor executives. “You’re not going to get anywhere,” they told him. “We have better access. We braai with these guys [government officials].” In 2010, he learned that the industry were plying top government officials with World Cup hospitality tickets.
The second ban on the sale of alcohol, imposed in early July, was a shock for the industry. “They were completely caught off guard,” says Parry, whose research on the calamitous effect of heavy drinking on non-natural death rates and hospital trauma admissions helped motivate the decision. “Because they weren’t consulted before the second ban.”
Parry’s arguments were not part of the rationale for the first booze ban in mid-March. That move was championed by police minister Bheki Cele as a measure to control crime and possible popular resistance during the hard lockdown, and also to give hospitals a chance to prepare for the expected onslaught of Covid-19 cases.
“Data from Tygerberg Hospital in Bellville, Cape Town, shows trauma ward admissions rising 120% in the weekend after the second lockdown ended – from 75 cases to 155 cases. Eighty-five percent of those cases were clinically assessed to be alcohol-related.” Comparable spikes in violent injuries were seen at Groote Schuur and Chris Hani Baragwanath hospitals. Parry and many other activists believe that the ruling party has belatedly woken up to its power to protect citizens from harm.
“So the model would not function if everyone drank responsibly. They wouldn’t make the profits that shareholders want.” Another very big problem, of course, is that alcohol is lovely. Addiction counsellors may not agree with this claim. They will argue that alcohol creates more anxiety and depression than it does pleasure. That it creates the emotional void that it appears, deceptively, to fill. But that neat formula simply doesn’t capture the double-edged power of alcohol.
In his teens in Johannesburg, he was a moderate drinker. “I remember meeting girls and they’d say: ‘You don’t drink? Shit! A man who doesn’t drink? I could never hang out with you. ’ [No, man, grab a drink!]” Alcohol policy activist and researcher Maurice Smithers recently spoke to a doctor at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital, who told him that what he noticed after the end of the first lockdown was “the return of the unmistakable smell of alcohol mixed with blood”. Smithers is director of the Southern African Alcohol Policy Alliance in South Africa, which fights for better alcohol regulation. He is also writing a book on the long and vexed history of that regulation in South Africa.
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