Alcohol specialists meeting at Leicester University yesterday said that an independent watchdog body should be set up to police the marketing and promotion of alcopops. They said it was short-sighted to blame all the ills of underage drinking on the products and the British government needed to look at the whole question of teenage drinking.
The conference, organised by the charity Addictions Forum, heard from academics, doctors, youth workers and alcohol groups about the harm young people were exposed to from excessive drinking.
Ms Sarah Berger, director of Drinkline, said alcopops were blurring the line between children's sweet drinks and adult alcoholic drinks, but it was important to see these as part of a wider context of alcohol abuse.
Ms Berger said a ban on alcopops would be hard to implement, because of the difficulty in legally defining the drinks, and would not be effective.
The British industry-funded Portman Group runs a voluntary code on alcopops marketing - but it carries no sanctions other than bad publicity.
The drinks industry declined to send a speaker to the conference. However, Dr Douglas Cameron, of Leicester University, argued that concern over alcopops had been exaggerated and the drinks could prove a useful way for young people to learn about alcohol, although he admitted later he was speaking to some degree as a "devil's advocate".
Dr Cameron, senior lecturer in substance misuse, said new measures to curb sales of drinks to under-age drinkers, was based on questionable evidence.
"There is relatively little research being conducted into alcopops and a lot of the research that is under way hasn't reported any findings yet. Alcopops promote strong opinions - everybody knows what they think about them - but very few people have anything to really support their opinions."
Dr Cameron said alcopops could help the transition and learning process from non-drinking childhood to responsible adult drinking.
"We can't just let people loose at 18 and expect them to be sophisticated, intelligent, drinkers. People need to learn about alcohol, through gradual exposure and education."
He added: "We need to be less excessively prohibitionist. If we banned alcopops, young people would just revert to drinks like Bacardi and coke which existed before they came onto the market. Frankly, if kids want to get pissed they use cheap cider or vodka." - Guardian Service