In the UK, under the 1902 Licensing Act anyone detained under the 1898 Inebriates Act was banned from purchasing alcohol for three years.  Licensees could also be fined for selling to anyone banned under the Act.  Apparently, one Birmingham 'black list' is now available through a family history website (ancestry.co.uk) - for anyone seeking out skeletons in closets!  The main difference between the 1902 provisions and the 2009 Drink Banning Orders is that DBOs only tackle antisocial behaviour, whereas the focus of the 1902 provisions was 'inebriety'.  A DBO order simply says 'this person behaves badly when drunk', whereas a 1902 ban presupposed they were also an 'habitual drunkard'.  I guess, then, we (in Britain, at least) are back to the future in terms of individually targetting drink-related crime at point-of-sale, but not in terms of using purchase bans to tackle harmful drinking per se. 

James Nicholls
________________________________________
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robin G W Room [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 29 October 2010 11:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: individual drinker bans -- back to the future

Listmates --

   Below you will find an initiative by the government of the Northern Territory of Australia to institute a person-specific bans on drinking.
   There is an interesting cross-national piece to be done about the prehistory of such measures, and I would be interested in corresponding with ohters interested in this.  In temperance times, there were various initiatives to "blacklist" heavy drinkers, often at the call of family members.  It can be seen as  part of the move in the Progressive Era to have the state intervene in the family on behalf of the weak against the strong (cf. for the US Tony Platt, The Child-Minders).  The supervisor of the Temperance Boards in Sweden in 1940 described them as a defense for the family against "petty domestic tyrants" (quoted from memory from the Helsinki ICAA conference proceedings). Margaretha Jaervinen did an article in Contemporary Drug Problems around 1991 about the Finnish alcohol monopoly sending out inspectors to investigate where a woman seemed to have been buying too much alcohol -- but not necessarily cutting her off if it turned out she was buying for her husband as a way of limiting his drinking -- i.e., using the wife as an agent of the state's social control. The book Punched Drunk mentions the LCBO in Ontario cutting off drinkers (putting them on what was known as the "Indian list", in an era of Prohibition for nonassimilated Aboriginal Canadians) in the 1950s at the request of wives and other family members, although the statistics show clearly that this request was often not accepted by the LCBO. There are still US states with state liquor stores (Ohio, as I remember) where it is theoretically possible for the family to ask the stores to blacklist drinkers.

    Particularly where there had been a period of Prohibition, the alcohol control laws in the 1920s-1950s often included these individually-oriented controls, which were abandoned nearly everywhere in the 1950s-1960s as seeming too much of an intrusion on emerging standards of "privacy". (Part of the background of the "purple book", Bruun et al. 1975, was the argument by civil-libertarian sociologists in a Finnish context that universal control measures such as price and hours of sale could be effective without these individual-oriented measures). Now, with the emergence of ASBOs under Tony Blair and similar individually-oriented behaviour controls, we are back to the future.
    The historically-oriented piece should take a  look at how effective such measures seem to have been.  One clear signal of their potential effectiveness is the large rise in cirrhosis mortality after the abandonment of the Swedish alcohol rationing system in 1955, studied by Thor Norstroem.
          Robin

________________________________
some detailes from the attachedfact-sheet:
Individual and Third-Party Referrals to the AOD Tribunal
It is anticipated that other people, such as the police, family members and health workers, will be able to ask
the Tribunal to make orders against someone. For example, if one of your family members has a drinking
problem and is causing harm, you would be able to go to the Tribunal and ask them to make an order banning
your family member from purchasing take away alcohol. The AOD Tribunal would look at what has been
happening and your family member would be assessed by a professional.

A person with an alcohol problem could choose to get themselves banned so they can more easily deal with
their alcohol or drug problem.


-----Original Message-----
From: CCH Parliament [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, 28 October 2010 3:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Political Alert - Draft Alcohol Bills Tabled in Parliament (NT)

Please find attached:

DRAFT ALCOHOL BILLS TABLED IN PARLIAMENT (NT)

The Minister for Alcohol Policy, Delia Lawrie, released two key pieces
of draft legislation that detail the most comprehensive alcohol reforms
in the Territory's history. The draft Bills, the Prevention of
Alcohol-Related Crime and Substance Misuse Bill and the SMART Court Bill
were tabled in the Northern Territory Parliament.