Prof Casswell, who is the director of the Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (Shore) at Massey University, told an audience of about 60 people at the Public Health Association conference in Dunedin yesterday education alone would not work in changing people's behaviour.
Speaking after her address, she said the environment needed to be changed and would involve reducing the availability of alcohol through hours of sale, where it could be bought, the purchasing age and increasing its price.
Measures such as drink-driving legislation, controls on marketing and early intervention for those with alcohol problems were other important aspects.
Trying to persuade people they should change a deeply embedded and pleasurable behaviour such as alcohol use was not as easy as educating people about swine flu, which was something people had never heard of, she said.
While it appeared that concerns about law and order were driving calls for change, Prof Casswell said there was recent recognition of alcohol as one of the risk factors in the global burden of disease and that it was making a far greater contribution than illicit drugs.
People were becoming more worried about the increase in young people's drinking, not just in New Zealand, and the emerging evidence of the detrimental effect alcohol had on the development of young people's brains.
The earlier people began drinking, the more likely they were to run into problems.
Prof Casswell, whose address dealt with the role alcohol companies played in influencing alcohol policy, said their emphasis was that all the risks were from drinking heavily and that this only applied to a small group.
Moderate drinking was seen to bring only benefits, while no mention was made of health factors linked to moderate use such as increased risk of breast cancer.
Organisations such as the International Centre for Alcohol Policy, a not-for-profit group supported by major alcohol producers, put an emphasis on multi-sector partnerships and interventions which were aimed at individuals.
Their policies never mentioned the word effectiveness, but words such as feasible, realistic, pragmatic, reasonable and acceptable, she said.
There was no room for partnership between public health practitioners and the industry because there was too much conflict of interest, she said.
Some of the ways the industry exerted its influence on policy were by sponsorships, funding research and critiques of research, and the communicating of "scientific" or educational material which had a bias towards furthering the aims of producers, she said.
