Alcohol products with bright colours, sweet flavours and novelty packaging are becoming familiar to children long before they can legally buy them.
Lucy Rocca, founder of Soberistas, argues that this early familiarity – not teenage rebellion – is the real public health concern, and that alcohol industry self-regulation, which judges intent rather than impact, leaves young people unprotected. Public policy, she writes, must confront not just how much alcohol people consume, but how early and how comfortably it is made familiar.
