The Addiction Programme Manager - Major Lynette Hutson

Salvation Army’s National Manager for Addictions and Supportive Accommodation.

Lynette Hutson’s job encompasses all the Salvation Army’s work in mental health, homelessness and addictions such as to alcohol, drugs and gambling. While alcohol is an area of concern on its own, it also flows through each of these other areas of social need, exacerbating problems for those already struggling, Hutson says.

And it’s been a problem New Zealand has battled since the days of early European settlement, when alcohol surfaced as one of this country’s first social problems.

“We really haven’t made progress.”

Hutson says there is a double standard in New Zealand around how alcohol is used. “There’s one drink between being the hero and being the failure, the one everyone looks down on.”

Although it’s not a very Kiwi trait to confront friends over their problem drinking, it’s a cultural shift that this country needs, she says. As a strategy, minding your own business doesn’t work.

“People withdraw from that person, isolate them, and the problem gets worse.”

The Salvation Army estimates a person’s drinking problem has a significant negative impact on 20 others around them, from family to employers to friends. Hutson says it upsets her to meet the young people whose parents are using Salvation Army services for drinking-related problems. Most appear haunted and startled.

Everybody has a level of vulnerability, she says, and if too many risk factors collide at one time, people who have never shown any predisposition to problem drinking can suddenly develop severe alcohol addictions. She has met successful, happy people, some of them holding positions of very high standing in society, whose lives have been shattered by an unfortunate set of circumstances and the alcoholism that grew out of their despair.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” she says.

Hutson would like to see an increase in taxes on alcohol, restraints around the number of liquor outlets in a community and alcohol taken off the shelves of supermarkets.

“It should never be so entwined with food and the necessities of life.”

She says, in New Zealand culture, there is a worry that you’ll be viewed as a “wowser” if you speak out against the easy availability of alcohol.

She takes heart in the recent rise in tobacco prices and the determination for significant change that this illustrated, but, she says, alcohol reform will be a much bigger fight.

“It’s more culturally entrenched.”