Temporary sobriety initiatives: emergence, possibilities and constraints

Abstract

At the same time as the Australian media was focusing attention on problems stemming from youthful binge drinking and was decrying a problematic national drinking culture, voluntary (and often philanthropic) campaigns oriented around temporarily giving up alcohol emerged. Although these temporary sobriety initiatives (TSI) originally positioned themselves as a solution to the problems being discussed, their popular appeal proved to be their alignment with larger currents of neoliberal governance in the fields of health, well-being, productivity and civic duty via philanthropy. This critical cultural history conducts a discourse analysis of TSI-generated materials and examines quantitative participant data to better understand how the initiatives framed themselves as a solution to the identified problems at the same time as they ever-more overtly pitched themselves to an already responsibilized segment of the population. The implications of these findings point to the larger role that TSI can play in addressing, in a non-regulatory way, both attitudes and behaviours among the majority of the population who are not considered problem drinkers.

Notes

1. The term ‘binge drinking’ was popularized in public health discourse in the United States and was principally used to denote the excessive weekend drinking behaviour of American college students. It had previously been used in ways that were less explicit in their connection to youth (Berridge, Herring, and Thom 2009).

2. For a more comprehensive study of the prominence of various issues related to drinking and alcohol around this time, see Fogarty (2012); Fogarty and Chapman (2011).

3. A common critique of TSI is that they also promote practices, such as post-campaign binge drinking and an all-or-nothing attitude, that are contrary to their stated aim of promoting a more considered approach to alcohol. These claims certainly warrant further investigation, but to do so in this article would unproductively split the focus of the current study.

4. Many scholarly and casual commentators have nonetheless noted that despite the targeted nature of the measures and their rather harsh stipulations, they failed to achieve the desired outcomes. After hours drinking continued in secret and ‘sly-grogging’ become more prominent (Luckens 2008). The laws also created new problems associated with the frenzied drinking behaviour of what notoriously became known as the ‘six o’clock swill’, the phenomenon whereby pub patrons would hurriedly drink as much as they could in the hour between the end of their working day the closure of the pubs (Harden 2010). The undoing of these early closing measures in the 1950s and 60s were therefore also a response to widespread frustration and dissatisfaction with new aspects of the public drinking culture, which included a criminal element controlling a significant share of the liquor trade, the sociability of pub culture being lost in favour of utilitarian approaches to consuming as much as one could in limited time and the original law failing to have achieved its desired ends.

5. Just before the issues of youth and binge drinking came to media prominence, there were also sweeping new measures introduced in areas of the Northern Territory that imposed total bans on the consumption, possession and sale of alcohol. These measures, part of what is commonly referred to as the Northern Territory Intervention, were blatant in their targeting of Indigenous Australians for the perceived excesses of their consumption patterns and the toll (social, economic) of these practices on their communities. Although the debate about the Intervention and its provisions with respect to alcohol was contemporaneous with the discussion about binge and youth drinking and fundamentally concerned what were perceived as deficiencies with respect to the responsible consumption of alcohol among members of a subset of the general population, the complexity of the Intervention’s implementation, the troubled history of relations between the government and Aboriginal communities and the relative quarantining of one discussion from another in public discourse makes it both unfeasible and problematically reductive to bring both contexts to bear on the present study.

6. A standard drink is often significantly smaller than a typical serving. In addition to this aggregate guideline, drinkers are to consume no more than four standard drinks in a sitting. Alcohol consumption among adolescents should be delayed as long as possible and pregnant and breastfeeding women are advised to abstain altogether (NHMRC 2009).

7. There was renewed interest in alcohol-fuelled violence following the one-punch death of 18-year-old Thomas Kelly in Sydney in July 2012. Subsequent incidents of a lethal nature led the Premier of New South Wales to introduce much harsher penalties for drunken offences, including violence, in 2014.