Essays as a policing tool, why not?

You can’t please everyone, but more people are likely to be gratified, or at least amused, than upset by the Wanaka police move to allow underage New Year drinkers breaching public liquor bans to escape $250 fines by instead writing an essay on what alcohol does to the teenage brain.

Just how much of a salutary lesson this proves to be will, inevitably, be a mix of giddily inconsistent outcomes.

This, itself, is still likely to be an improvement on the generally flaccid inadequacies of the previous official approach in this regional trouble spot for underage holiday drinking.

Police have in past years initially been issuing warnings, with fines for second offenders. This represented an underreaction to the absolute mess that illegal young drinkers can make of themselves, others and the environment before they receive the second-time-around warning.

And any follow-up fine proves far more severe for those who cannot afford it than for those who might be in position to farm the payments off to the same shamefully indulgent families or friends who set them up to be illegally drinking in the first place.

It’s a fair bet that the more spoilt misbehavers will for these reasons still prefer the fine over the essay. If the other harder-up group are grateful for the option, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

The most immediate criticism has been that the new approach is less to the point and less just than finding and penalising those who provided the underaged with booze.

Well, yes, obviously. But it’s not an either-or choice. The two measures aren’t mutually exclusive – or equally achievable. The work required to successfully prosecute the suppliers places much greater burdens on police resourcing.

So what we’ve seen this time is that at least 30 underage drinkers spent part of New Year’s Day in Wanaka handwriting researched essays, albeit with the assistance background scientific material provided by the cops.

Better than Bart Simpson-styled lines on a blackboard, we grant you. But might it be propaganda? One side of an argument?

OK, these won’t be essays to the highest standards of academic rigour, but that’s not really the point.

The neuroscience does seem pretty clear. When under-18s drink, it does have a more severe, Iq-damaging effect on their brain development, notably on the hippocampus, used for recall and memory, and the frontal cortex of the brain, for planning, regulating emotions and goal-setting.

Some of the young essayists might find this provides reason to reconsider their choices.

Others will probably look at words like hippocampus and wonder whether $250 was really too high a price to pay after all.