Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. Ann Johnston Dowsett

says Jernigan. “We cannot discount Carrie Bradshaw. But if Carrie Bradshaw hadn’t been accompanied by a push by the spirits industry, she would have been a pebble in the pond. As it was, she was a boulder. Women had never been targeted before in the way they were targeted: after alcopops came distilled spirits line extensions—flavored vodkas, absolutely every fruit you could imagine.”

      In recent years, several countries, including Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia, have imposed special taxes on alcopops, addressing widespread concerns about their popularity as a drink of initiation. Germany nearly doubled the tax; Australia boosted it by 70 percent. Many countries found substantial reductions in the consumption of these beverages.

      And many other countries haven’t done a thing. “In the past twenty-five years, there has been tremendous pressure on females to keep up with the guys,” says Jernigan. “Now the industry’s right there to help them. They’ve got their very own beverages, tailored to women. They’ve got their own individualized, feminized drinking culture. I’m not sure that this was what Gloria Steinem had in mind.”

      In the past decade, there has been a huge amount of effort to stop underage drinking in the United States. Says Jernigan: “It’s made some impact with the boys. We are not getting anywhere with the girls.” The more marketing kids see, the more likely they are to initiate drinking at an early age. This is 360-degree marketing, embedded in Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on television, and in the movies. Last year, the Australian Medical Association censured Facebook for allowing alcohol companies to target children: “Social networking sites … are honing a more aggressive and insidious form of marketing that tracks online and profiles, and tailors specific marketing accordingly.”

      More than three-quarters of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds in the United States own cell phones; and of Facebook’s one billion users, 600 million visit the social media site primarily through mobile devices. “This is the ultimate extension of lifestyle advertising,” says Jernigan. “The brand is now a human being. It’s interacting with you in real time. It’s talking to you on Facebook. These are worlds that are being created by the brand in conjunction with, in cooperation and collaboration with, their user base. It is a marvelous innovation in marketing, and it’s a disaster for us.”

      Brands mounting their ads on YouTube, launching their own channels: this is known as pull marketing. The consumer is seeking out the ad, rather than tuning out a commercial. They’re focused. The granddaddy of this genre, Tea Partay by Smirnoff—a two-and-a-half-minute ad—has had more than six million YouTube viewers. “This is all about engagement,” says Jernigan. “It’s the future of marketing, and it’s virtually unregulated.”

      There’s a strong public health interest in delaying the onset of drinking: the brain is still in its plasticity state during adolescence. Every day in the United States, 4,750 kids under the age of sixteen start their drinking careers. As Jernigan says, “This is a human capital development issue.”

      When it comes to deconstructing advertising and the role it plays in our lives, few do a better job than Jernigan and Jean Kilbourne, the woman behind the film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. I became intrigued with Kilbourne, reading her brilliant book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. In the opening pages, she tells the story of her own early experimenting with alcohol, which taught her that “alcohol could erase pain. From then on, for almost 20 years, my most important relationship was with alcohol.” She saw a doctor about her drinking. His response: she was too young, too well educated, and too good-looking to be an alcoholic. Eventually, Kilbourne says drinking ended up “burying me alive”: “I used to joke that Jack Daniel’s was my most constant lover.” She writes of her perfect verbal score on the SAT, dating Ringo Starr, being in love with Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, partying at Roman Polanski’s apartment—and confronting her eventual addiction in 1976. Like me, she was in the middle stages of the disease.

      Astutely, Kilbourne warns us: “Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but also to feel that our most significant relationships are with the products that we buy. It turns lovers into things and things into lovers.”

      Two years ago, I wanted to meet Kilbourne, having had a spirited and bracing conversation with her on the phone. I was intrigued. Learning that she was flying to Toronto to give a speech in a nearby city, I offered to pick her up and ferry her to her destination. It was a smart idea. Kilbourne is incisive, savvy, and thoughtful. We had a long drive—good for getting to know someone, poor for taking notes: my hands were on the wheel.

      The next time I spoke to her, Kilbourne was laid up at home outside of Boston, having broken her leg skydiving. I wanted to know: why are we so oblivious to the effect advertising has on us? “Ads are so trivial and silly that people feel above them,” says Kilbourne. “And for that reason, they don’t pay conscious attention. The advertisers love it: our radar is not on. We’re not on guard; it gets into our subconscious and affects us very deeply.”

      Kilbourne quotes the chairman of an ad agency saying, “If you want to get into people’s wallets, first you have to get into their lives.” And there’s no doubt: the spirits industry has infiltrated the female world. Which makes me want to say: Is alcohol the new tobacco?