In comparison, I can only think of one patient I have treated this year for whom marijuana use was a problem. He was in his early 20s and had started suffering from seizures, for which both marijuana and alcohol were postulated as triggers. The main reason he seemed to be smoking five cones a day, however, was as self-medication for his low mood. As often occurs, mental health and substance misuse were interlinked. Rather than the government taunting him like an ignorant schoolyard bully, calling him a stoner sloth, it should be supporting doctors like me to prescribe evidence-based treatments for depression, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction.

"When you realise you should have hit the books and not the bong": one of the sloths from the Stoner Sloth campaign. Credit:stonersloth.com.au

I am not advocating for teens to smoke marijuana, but it is a bizarre target for a government that spends millions mopping up alcohol-related harm, particularly given its associations with motor vehicle accidents, domestic violence, and assaults including date rape.

Australia's Preventative Health Taskforce notes that one in five Australians binge-drink at least monthly, with the 20-29 year old age group at highest risk. Of the teenagers that #StonerSloth targets, 28 per cent of females and 24 per cent of males regularly drink at risky levels.

When doctors assess patients' alcohol consumption, our unit of measurement is the "standard drink": 10 grams of alcohol. Actual pure alcohol consumed matters far more than whether it is in the form of beer, wine or spirits, and yet alcohol taxation isn't volumetrically-based. The taskforce commented that a shift to tax per gram of pure alcohol, coupled with a minimum ("floor") price for a drink, would appear from international evidence to be the most likely model to reduce alcohol-related harm. This would require taking on the alcohol industry juggernauts. An easier first step would be to mandate that all alcohol sales data be made available to public health researchers, so they could better model alternative taxation strategies.