RUSSIA DECLARES WAR ON BOOTLEG VODKA

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MOSCOW (RIA Novosti commentator Vladimir Simonov)

In his state of the nation address this year, President Vladimir Putin cited an alarming statistic: 40,000 people die every year from alcohol poisoning, above all from bootleg liquor.

Most of them are young breadwinners.

But Russians say the only situation worse than this could be a prohibition.

In mid-May, the Russian press carried critical articles "commemorating" the 20th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev's decree On Combating Alcoholism. He signed it in the hope of eradicating this traditional evil of Russian society once and for all. But the hasty initiative resulted in the closure of dozens of distilleries, the curtailed production of natural wines, and mass destruction of vineyards. The crackdown on the sale of spirits provoked an unprecedented rise in the production of illegal liquor and home brews. Long lines stood at the shops that sometimes sold liquor.

The 1985 "prohibition law" inflicted serious material damage on Russia and utterly failed to improve public health, as Russians simply refused to drink less. But the man behind the idea is not abandoning his campaign. Following in Putin's footsteps, Gorbachev recently called on the government to fight alcoholism. "We are approaching a catastrophically high figure of liquor consumption," he said. "The country, where about 14 liters of pure alcohol is consumed per capita, is killing itself."

The World Health Organization considers the average per capita consumption of the equivalent of 8 liters of pure alcohol a year to be a sign of a country with a dangerous level of alcohol consumption.

This time Putin's and Gorbachev's warnings struck a chord in society and caused a broad discussion in the national press and electronic media, especially after the National Alcohol Association of Russia made public its results for 2004.

According to the organization, last year Russians drank 220.6 million decaliters (dal) of vodka and other liquors, 78.6 million dal of grape wine, 884.7 million dal of beer, and 6.4 million dal of brandy. As a prominent Moscow sociologist said ironically, "When you stop to consider the figures, you wonder when people find the time to work and study."

Studies show that alcoholism and related excesses are seen in a different age group in Russia than abroad. In neighboring Finland, heavy drinkers are mostly young people, whereas drinking Russians are mature men, often with a good education, whose material situation has nose-dived dramatically in the past 15 years.

This age bracket was hit the hardest by the economic "shock treatment" of Russia's first pro-market government of Yegor Gaidar in the early 1990s. This group also suffered the full consequences of the destruction of their lifestyle and values. The Gaidar government was also responsible for the rash decision to cancel the state monopoly on the production and sale of spirits, which is being criticized increasingly sharply in administrative and expert quarters. As a result, the so-called spirits mafia grew incredibly strong in Russia. It consists of the shadow producers of bootleg vodka and of "dual purpose" liquids, such as liquid window cleaning detergent and car lock defreezers, which are a health hazard.

Today up to 50% of spirits sold on the Russian market cannot be called the real thing, and the loss of the state monopoly costs the treasury 40-50 billion rubles annually ($1 is about 28 rubles).

This hair-raising threat to the population's health and ultimately to the security of the country forced the Russian government to launch a veritable war on underground producers several months ago. The Agriculture Ministry proposed creating a state joint stock company that would have the monopoly right to buy alcohol from producers and hence control the quality of the end product. The police and security agencies have rapidly increased operations to end the liquor mafia and secret factories where counterfeit is produced. The service of Russia's chief sanitary physician is also doing its bit: Last year it condemned over 5,000 batches of surrogate alcohol and spirits (about 1.2 million liters).

Russia is studying the West's experience of combating alcoholism, which has proved effective. The first groups of Alcoholics Anonymous appeared in Russia in the late 1980s, and their number has swelled in the past few months to 226 throughout the country, including 37 in Moscow. This is much fewer than in New York, but the growth rate is inspiring.

The Russian Orthodox Church has energetically joined in the anti-alcohol campaign. "We believe that the main factor of the spread of this dangerous disease is a lack of proper spiritual development," said Metropolitan Kliment, business manager of the Moscow Patriarchy. "The loss of moral guidelines is the root cause." We should not so much search for medical antidotes as encourage people to spiritual and moral self-improvement work, the priest explained.

Self-assistance groups of alcoholics (a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous) and special groups for teenagers from alcoholics' families have been created at many Russian monasteries. These groups accept anyone, including non-Orthodox believers and atheists.

Before the Second World War, the average per capita alcohol consumption in Russia was the equivalent of 1.9 liters of pure alcohol. Without dreaming about a return to that figure, Russians nevertheless hope that more people will start just raising a glass to each other's health rather than drinking themselves to death.

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