‘Every phone is a bottle shop’: Pandemic hangover prompts booze ban call
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A surge in Australians seeking help for alcohol use during the pandemic has prompted calls for a two-hour “safety pause” between when people can order liquor and have it delivered to their home.
Treatments where alcohol was the “principal drug of concern” jumped more than 16 per cent to 87,334 between the financial years ending 2020 and 2022, while the new data released on Wednesday also revealed a concerning rate of alcohol worries among younger Australians.
Health workers have noticed a surge in demand for support managing problematic alcohol use.Credit: AFR
Health workers are reporting a “new demographic” of people experiencing problems with alcohol consumption – among them working and stay-at home mothers.
The director of addiction medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, Associate Professor Yvonne Bonomo, said as things had begun to return to normal following the disruptions of the pandemic, people had realised they were unable to stop drinking.
“What they’re saying is ‘I used to be able to give myself a break from drinking, and it was fine. Now, if I stop drinking, I feel sick. I’m nauseated, I’m sweaty, I feel really irritable or agitated, I can’t sleep’, which are the early signs of the body having adapted to alcohol,” Bonomo said.
“We’re seeing middle-aged women, many of whom are either stay-at-home moms, or working … Once dinner is sorted, and the kids are off in bed or doing their homework, that’s when they find they can’t not have that drink, because they feel so awful.”
One in every two Australians who are seeking treatment principally due to alcohol were aged 30 to 49, according to the newly released Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data.
Meanwhile, Bonomo said her service was also seeing vulnerable young women who were waking up in hospital not able to remember what happened during a night out. Young men were presenting with physical injuries from assaults or being involved in physical altercations, she said.
“All three of those groups have worsening mental health [and are] just finding they can’t cope without the drink,” Bonomo said.
The increase in demand for alcohol treatment services was being fuelled by trauma caused by the pandemic, other community stresses and by retailers aggressively marketing alcohol towards those at risk, said Caterina Giorgi, chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.
Giorgi called on state governments to consider banning express home delivery of alcohol.
“We’ve now got a scenario where every phone is a bottle shop,” she said.
Giorgi said state governments should introduce a two-hour “safety pause” from the time an order is made until it’s delivered to the home “because we know that alcohol that is delivered really rapidly to people’s houses is more likely to be drank at high-risk levels”.
She said most alcohol marketing was now “dark” which means that it was only seen by the people it was intended for, coming in the form of push notifications, text messages and targeted online advertisements.
Dr Hester Wilson, alcohol and other drugs spokesperson for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, called on a ban on alcohol advertising and for political parties to stop accepting donations from alcoholic beverage makers.
“It’s high time for government to recognise that alcohol is the new cigarettes,” the Sydney GP said.
The highest rate of demand for treatment where alcohol was the “principal drug of concern” was in Victoria, which endured six lockdowns over 2020 and 2021. There were close to 28,000 instances of people seeking help in the last financial year – almost a 40 per cent jump in two years.
Ballarat resident Campbell, who did not want to use his last name for privacy reasons, said his drinking habits had gone from bad to worse during the pandemic.
“You live a series of lies and mistruths and you convince yourself of it as well. [You say] ‘I’m OK. I’m getting up in the morning and going to work. I’m not drunk when I go to work. I’m not drunk on the way home’, [but I was] pretty much every moment in between.”
When the transport worker in his 50s decided to go to rehabilitation last year, he said he was told that the facility was being flooded with cases of “COVID alcoholism”. He has been alcohol-free since.
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