The Ethics Of Melon Heads

This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

Even if your kid wouldn't be caught dead doing actual kitchen work, danger lurks. They can get a fake id and go buy some Fuzzy Navel Zippers, the "original gelatin shot," at a liquor store. There are other flavors of Zippers manufactured by BPNC, Inc., too -- Melon Head, Blue Hawaiian and the distinguished Purple Hooter. For more information, check out their Web site.

I may be wrong, but I don't imagine many adults are interested in consuming Purple Hooter Zippers. It is illegal to sell original gelatin shooters to minors, of course. But it is not illegal to design products and advertising for people under 21 years-old. The beer and spirits industries say they don't do this. There is an industry "Code of Responsible Practices for Beverage Alcohol Advertising and Marketing" and the industry's trade association really does succeed at getting some companies that violate that code to pull their bad ads.

But the case of Zippers pretty quickly shows how kooky the whole business of regulating liquor marketing is in modern media America. Take the Web site: the code says "age verification mechanisms should be employed" liquor product sites. And indeed, zippershot.com asks when you were born. Now, go to the site and lie about your age and surf the site. Age verification? Right, dude.

Take the product. You cannot prove that Zippers or all the peach and watermelon "alcopops" and soda-flavored malt drinks on the market now are targeted at teens and underage drinkers or are intended to be "gateway" drinks. But it insults basic human intelligence to suggest they aren't. And a recent survey by the American Medical Association of kids between 12 and 18 shows 31 percent of girls and 19 percent of boys had drunk alcopops in the last six months.

The industry code, though, says that if booze marketing appears in media that can be expected to be seen by an audience that is 70 percent adult is ok, if it's not too sexed up, abusive, untrue or has some other, highly subjective, disqualifying feature.

So yes, the industry does somewhat restrict it's marketing, but it's pretty much a farce.

But here's the tricky part. Why should the liquor industry restrict its marketing at all? Why shouldn't they invent Jello shooters or even laced chocolate syrup or boozy juice boxes with Sponge Bob on them?

There is a whole squadron of researchers, academics and do-gooder interest groups out there convinced that the liquor industry and its marketing target kids and do so effectively, adding to drunk driving and binge drinking fatalities and long-term alcoholism. There is another platoon of researchers, libertarians and industry-groups that says all that is absurd neo-prohibitionism. Ads don't make kids drink and they don't make grown-ups drink, and even if they did, it's a free country. Underage drinking went down when the drinking age was set at 21 and it's stayed basically steady since. What's the big issue?

Well, the really big issue, I think, is hard to get at, but it involves how our society apportions blame, responsibility and, for lack of a better word, vilification.

For example: makers of firearms and vodka are virtually never punished financially or legally when their products cause or contribute to deaths. Yet doctors who are trying to save lives or deliver babies or cure diseases are routinely punished when there are bad outcomes even when there is no evidence of evil intention, incompetence or gross negligence. Drug companies that invent medicines and devices that help millions and harm only a few may pay billions for such "negligence." But not the makers of gelatin shooters, Saturday Night Specials and sniper rifles.

I don't get it. We expect much of the good guys and little of the bad guys.

I'm not arguing that the government should regulate beer ads more tightly. I think vilifying Purple Hooters is proper. But the truth is, kids can only be saturated by liquor marketing if their parents have raised them and allowed them to be saturated by media -- TV, radio, Internet -- in the first place.

There is personal responsibility. It's just odd what sectors of the market we demand it from and where we don't.

We have two impulses in regulating risk symbolized in the Principal and the Gym Teacher.

One school of political thought, typically more liberal, wants the Principal to set the rules, to keep bad influences out of the school, to solve society's ills for them and make bad things go away by rules and regulation.

The Gym Teacher school dribbles the ball hard on the floor and says, "People, you and only you are responsible for what you do, what you put in your body, who you hang out with, what you do with your time and if you think your mommy is going to protect you in the big bad world, you're a loser."

Increasingly Americans want Principals but not Gym Teachers. But we started all this by talking to parents. And they better follow the Gym Teachers.

Sorry if this was a little rambling. Maybe I shouldn't have had that bowl of Jello for dessert.

E-mail questions, comments, complaints, arguments and ideas to
Against the Grain. We will publish some of the interesting (and civil) ones, sometimes in edited form.

By Dick Meyer