Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 14 – The Russian
Ministry of Industry and Trade says that unregistered and thus illegal hard
alcohol, primarily in the form of samogon,
and surrogates like cleansers make up 50 to 70 percent of national, figures
that suggest alcohol consumption there is twice to almost two and a half times
greater than Moscow typically acknowledges.
That in turn means that Russia almost
certainly leads the world in per capita consumption of hard alcohol, something
that in recent years it has been at pains to deny, and that a very large share
of Russian drinkers are at risk from alcohol or chemical poisoning or even
death from surrogates (ria.ru/society/20170213/1487885922.html).
The admission came
in a report on the more than 70 people who died from drinking a cleanser in
Irkutsk, a choice they supposedly made because legal alcohol was “inaccessible
to a large swath of the population both by price and by location and one that
was made easier by the fact, the ministry said, that a third of stores selling
alcohol are prepared to sell its illegal forms.
Duma deputies have
reacted by repeating their earlier calls for a crackdown, their support for the
ministry’s plan to limit the sale of hard alcohol close to schools, universities,
hospitals and kindergartens, and their urging exclusion zones be expanded from
25 meters to 300 or even more (znak.com/2017-02-13/minpromtorg_ozvuchil_prichinu_massovogo_otravleniya_boyaryshnikom_v_irkutskoy_oblasti).
The ministry’s
announcement also led to broader criticism of the Putin regime. Anatoly Baranov, the editor of the FORUM.msk
portal said that if what the ministry says is true, implying that things may be
even more dire, then the situation with regard to alcoholism “is even worse
than it was under [Yeltsin]” (forum-msk.org/material/news/12820977.html ).
That
does not speak well of a Russian president who has presented himself as a healthy
model and promoter of sobriety.
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