Guyon Espiner: Alcohol causes $9.1 billion of social harm. Surely that’s too high a price?

Opinion: If you go through the back catalogue of the times you got too drunk – mine is quite extensive – I bet most of them happened at your home or someone else’s.

It’s actually quite hard to get drunk in a bar. There are distractions: other people, music and food. There’s waiting to get served, smaller drink sizes and the expectations of your friends and other patrons. There’s the bar staff, security and of course, the price barrier.

Drinking in a pub, club or bar celebrates a lot of what is good about alcohol: a social experience where the booze itself is not necessarily the main act.

The Greeks, who pretty much invented sitting around drinking and wittering on, had a symposiarch who ran the show. He would water down the wine (usually to about 3-4% alcohol), call out problem drinkers and cut them off.

Buying cheap booze from the supermarket or bottle store strips out much of the social and supervisory elements of drinking. And we’ve been doing much more of it. In 2007, 68% of alcohol was bought from an off-licence, but a recent study of drinking behaviour for the Evidence-Based Policing Centre now puts the figure at 80%.

Now, finally, tighter regulation is coming for bottle stores and supermarkets, in Auckland at least.

Auckland Council has spent a decade – and more than $1 million of ratepayers’ money in legal fees – battling the vested liquor industry interests to introduce a Local Alcohol Policy (LAP), setting times and conditions for alcohol sales.

Barring some last-minute power lobbying, bottle stores and supermarkets won’t be able to sell alcohol after 9pm and a moratorium will freeze new off-licences for two years in 23 areas already saturated with booze outlets.

Christchurch, which gave up on an LAP in 2017, after also spending big on legal fees fighting the liquor industry, is considering following suit.