The Portman Group has launched an advertising campaign aimed at discouraging excessive drinking among 18-24 year olds. It is called "If you do do drink, don't do drunk", the sort of patronising middle-aged attempt at being hip which makes young people cringe. It has spent a reported £1 million of its members' money on the exercise – a considerable sum in the general run of things but loose change to the Group's paymasters in the major drink companies.

Any reader of Alert will be aware of the problems arising from abusive drinking among the targeted age group and it does not take a great deal of imagination to see that more than a few advertisements are needed to deal with them. Does that sound churlish? Surely some acknowledgement should be made to the effort the industry is making to minimise the damage which its product can cause to individuals and the financial burden is imposes on society as a whole – an estimated £3 billion to the NHS alone? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

A number of factors need to be taken into consideration. The first of these is the purpose of the Portman Group itself. Ostensibly it is "to reduce the misuse of alcohol by the minority through a strategy of working with other organisations locally and nationally". The very mission statement, by stressing the word 'minority', fosters the comfortable attitude that it is really someone else's problem.

The Portman Group is billed as the means by which the alcohol industry regulates itself but here there will always be a contradiction. If it ever succeeded in reducing the "misuse of alcohol by the minority", even to within the so-called sensible limits, then it would bring about a disastrous fall in the profits of its members – Allied Domecq, Bacardi-Martini, Bulmers, Campbell Distillers Pernod-Ricard, Diageo, Interbrew UK, Scottish and Newcastle, and Seagram. No board of directors is going to tolerate this beyond the bare minimum necessary to show willing: to make a gesture, in other words: to avoid "going down Tobacco Road", as the first director of the Portman Group, John Rae, put it. The Portman Group is a beard. Its purpose is to satisfy a perceived demand for responsibility on the part of the industry without actually harming sales in any significant way.

Does the present advertising campaign confirm anyone in the belief that the industry is serious about the subject of abusive drinking among the young? After all, it is not long since some of its most senior figures were frightened that the popularity of the "rave culture" would produce a generation of non-drinkers. The response was to market drinks aimed precisely at the younger end of the market and which emphasised the psychoactive effects of the drug alcohol and so, by implication, blurred the line between their products and illicit substances.

"Marketing Alcohol to Young People", recently published by Eurocare and the subject of widespread interest and concern in the media (see page 5), demonstrates how the industry gears so much of its advertising towards the young, which naturally includes those below the legal age limit.

Do you believe in the sincerity of this campaign? Gisela Stuart does, and she is a junior health minister: "This new campaign's message is an important one." Dr Liam Fox, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, says that he wholeheartedly endorses "the Portman Group's hard-hitting campaign". Nick Harvey, a Liberal Democrat MP, thinks that the campaign "could not have arrived at a better time."

These are all professional politicians, of course, and are constantly required to express opinions on a vast range of subjects which are of necessity superficial. It is harder to dismiss the views of the Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, the Secretary of the Nursing Council on Alcohol, and the Director of Alcohol Concern.

These are all people working at the sharp end of the problem and know what they are talking about. When they endorse the campaign, their words deserve to be taken seriously. No-one could possibly say that the campaign will cause any damage and, of course, any attempt to minimise the problem of youth binge drinking is welcome. The difficulty is in the underlying purpose of the exercise, the gesture to ward off closer regulation, and in the potential efficacy of the advertisements themselves. Perhaps the distinguished endorsers felt that any adverse comment would be like attacking motherhood and apple-pie.

However, there are those of us without these scruples. It has already been argued that the purpose of the Portman Group is to keep the wolves of regulation away from the door of the brewers. But what about the advertisements themselves? Will these exercises in undergraduate humour have any effect? Showing them to a small group of teenagers elicited smiles, certainly, but there was incredulity at the suggestion that posters like this would in any way affect their intake of alcohol.

Picture the conference in the advertising agency: the copywriters sit round their table discussing ways of speaking to youth – a group to which, no doubt, some of them belong. They search their experience, personal or vicarious, for themes to illustrate the brief they have been given by the Portman Group. The premise must have seemed odd. They, or people indistinguishable from them, have been paid vast sums of money to persuade this same group to drink deeply and widely. Now they are being told to do the opposite with what, in terms of alcohol advertising, is a pittance. They are in the position of a lap dancer who has been asked to put in a word for chastity. The task seems so hopeless that they fall back on the last resort of advertising men: whimsy. The way into a young person's consciousness, they argue, is through a joke based at several removes on the simple conceit of "Men Behaving Badly", that vomit, inexpert sex, and futility are intrinsically funny. If Freud was right when he said that jokes are one way into the unconscious and are always indicative of repressed wishes, then someone needs help.

But the essential question is not about effectiveness or puerile, condescending humour but about sincerity. What do we say about an industry which through its agents spends a million pounds on an advertising campaign to counter some of the ill effects of its product on young people when it spends many times more than this on promoting the same products to the same age group? The word hypocrisy springs to mind.