Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 15 – In its
continuing quest for ways to get Russians to stop drinking, the Russian health
ministry has called for alcohol to be sold only in special stores rather than,
as now, in many ordinary groceries and shops, an arrangement it says has “shown
its effectiveness” in many countries but one that in Russia would lead to a
public health and economic disaster.
“Izvestiya” reports that Yevgeny
Bryun, the health ministry’s chief psychiatrist working on alcohol and drug
dependencies, plans to propose that Moscow ban the sale of alcohol in ordinary
grocery stores and shops and rely instead on dedicated stores selling only
alcoholic beverages (izvestia.ru/news/585263).
There is support for his idea in the
ministry, the paper says, because experts there note that such an arrangement
is already in place and working well in other countries. And they argue that banning the sale of
alcohol in regular stores will end what they see as a dangerous trend of
impulse buying of products consumers did not intend to purchase.
Russian consumption of alcohol has
fallen over the last five years, Bryun says, from 18 liters of pure alcohol to
13.5 liters per capita per year. (Those figures are for the population as a
whole. Working age males consume far more than that, and working age females
have been consuming more over the same period.)
Restricting alcohol sales to special
stores will cut that number still further, as an experiment now taking place in
the Sakha Republic suggests. There, since January 1, alcohol has been available
only in special stores, thus making it more difficult for consumers to obtain
and thus reducing their consumption.
But in Russia, there are two reasons
why such a step almost certainly would prove counterproductive. On the one
hand, the establishment of special liquor stores would deprive many food stores
of their high profit sales and thus lead to a contraction in their number and
unemployment among their current workforce.
And on the other, and perhaps even
more serious, history shows that if Russians cannot get legal alcohol, they
will turn to moonshine (“samogon” as it is known in Russian) or even more
dangerous alcohol surrogates with an increase in illnesses and deaths as a
result. That would be especially true in
rural areas where few liquor stores would be likely to be set up.
The “Izvestiya” article focuses on the
first of these problems: According to experts with whom the paper consulted,
sales of alcohol now account for about 12 percent of the income of supermarkets
in Russia and about 40 percent of kiosk sales in neighborhoods. The loss of
such sales would result in massive unemployment, small business owners say.
Aleksey Kanevsky, a leader of one
small business organization, says that banning alcohol sales in regular food
stores would “drive thousands of small entrepreneurs from the market and
millions of people would be left without work.”
And according to him, “few businessmen want to open alcohol shops.”
If he is right but Moscow goes ahead
anyway, two things are certain: there will be a push toward state-owned liquor
stores, yet another place for massive corruption, and many rural areas will be
left without any access to legally sold alcohol. In that event, most who drink
now won’t stop but rather will turn to more harmful potables with predictable
public health consequences.
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