Notably, the proportion of strong liquor, such as vodka, in the overall mix of Russian alcohol consumption is down substantially, by 31 per cent. “These results show that measures such as the introduction of monitoring systems, price increases and limited alcohol availability, work to save lives and health system costs”, said Carina Ferreira-Borges, from the Alcohol and Illicit Drugs programme at WHO Europe. Strict laws put in place by the Russian authorities since 2003 have resulted in a significant drop in alcohol-related deaths nationwide, a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed on Tuesday.
The changing relation between alcohol and life expectancy in Russia in 1965–2017
One notable feature of these tables is that the overall rate is dominated by deaths from accidental alcohol poisoning. The ethnic identity of drinkers cannot be established on the basis of available state statistics. To the best of the author’s knowledge, neither state statisticians nor academic analysts have ever looked at ethnic differentials in per capita consumption of alcohol. alcohol use disorder symptoms and causes These differentials are, however, significant and cannot be disregarded in any serious analysis of the alcohol situation in the country. The almost complete absence of information on the consumption of alcohol and on the health, social, and economic consequences of heavy drinking and alcohol abuse in the Soviet Union led to complacency on the part of the authorities and the public.
Russia Moves to Raise Legal Drinking Age to 21
The concept also featured a set of concrete results aimed to be achieved until 2020. It is impossible to be precise about the critical level of alcohol that would cause death, as this depends on personal characteristics of the victim and the toxicity of the alcoholic beverage. The rule of thumb often cited in Russian medical sources is that 0.5 liter of 40 percent vodka consumed by a healthy adult male of average weight without food in less than an hour would be fatal. On the other hand, an infant might die from drinking as little as an ounce of vodka. Generally speaking, wine and beer are much less dangerous because of their lower alcohol content. Wine and beer impurities and toxins present in some alcoholic beverages, particularly in poorly filtered distilled beverages, increase the dangers.
Alcohol sales regulations
With years of experience tasting and evaluating various beers, I love to share my opinions and insights with others and I am always eager to engage in lively discussions about my favorite beverage. If convicted of driving while intoxicated, you could face hefty fines of at least hundreds of euros or more. Children can enter a pub, tavern or similar establishment accompanied physical signs and other symptoms of alcoholism and alcohol abuse by a parent if under 16 or 17 years old. However, they must be at least 16 when with their elders to drink or by alcohol. This pertains to public consumption on “licensed premises.” Prince Edward Island, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Saskatchewan allow serving to minors at home. Minors may not always have permission to drink, depending on where they live.
Why Minimum Legal Drinking Age?
This, along with the government’s heavy dependence on alcohol sales as an important source of tax revenue, has resulted in high mortality rates, especially in middle-age working-class males, and a considerable gap in life expectancy between Russia and Western countries [10,15,16]. When looking at the recorded sales of alcoholic beverages for the period 2008–2018, a more or less steady decline is observed for all beverage types with the exception of cognacs, as sales have slightly increased by 6% for the latter (see Figure 4). Wine products decreased by 7%, beer and beer-based products by 30%, and sparkling wines by 35%.
7. Health Services’ Response and Decreasing Morbidity and Mortality Indicators
- Overview of legislation introduced since 2009 that aim at reducing alcohol consumption and/or increasing physical activity at the population level as part of a healthy lifestyle promotion approach.
- From the 1540s, Ivan IV began to establish kabaks (where spirits were produced and sold) in all major towns, with revenues going directly to the royal treasury.
- Also beginning in 2009, a series of media campaigns was launched by the government in order to raise awareness for the harmful use of alcohol and tobacco in the population and to promote the newly formed health centers and their early check-ups for risk factors and potential health issues (see Table A3 of the Appendix A).
- Anyone in Ireland drunk in public could face fines of at least €100-€500, which equals up to about $116-$582 USD.
- The first decline of mortality thus happened in 1985–1987 and the second in 1995–1998, whereas increases were observed in 1989–1994 and in 1999–2004 (Nemtsov, 2011).
- These gained monopoly status in 1649 and continued, through periods in which they were effectively franchised to local merchants, until the revolution.
These statistics are, of course, important for economic and budgetary analysis, but add little to our understanding of drinking and alcohol abuse. It should also be noted that the number of reported alcohol-related accidents and crimes depends on the availability and deployment of police forces in the country and priorities accorded to control of alcohol disturbances by cocaine abuse and addiction the public. The rapid growth of violent crime in Russia and the widely reported corruption of all law enforcement agencies suggest that the antisocial behavior of alcoholics and heavy drinkers is not very high on the government agenda, and available statistics should reflect this. Consumption of all homemade alcoholic beverages, both legal and illegal, is excluded.
Overview of the largest opinion polls in Russia, documenting attitudes towards alcohol and alcohol control. Dispanserization is carried out for all individuals regularly, although different schedules for different population groups exist, and includes preventive and specialized medical examinations for early detection and prevention of diseases. As you may have heard, The Moscow Times, an independent news source for over 30 years, has been unjustly branded as a “foreign agent” by the Russian government.
Pricing is an area with the largest evidence base globally in its effectiveness and impact on consumption levels and mortality outcomes. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that individuals’ alcohol consumption is largely influenced by the affordability of alcoholic beverages, which in turn is determined by prices of alcoholic beverages in relation to other products, as well as by consumers’ incomes and rates of inflation [60]. There are various ways to decrease alcohol affordability, but alcohol excise taxation has been recognized as the most cost-effective policy to prevent alcohol-related harms and, along with reducing alcohol availability and marketing, as one of the WHO’s “best buys” of alcohol control [41,61]. The concept was written as a strategy paper with goals, priorities, implementation mechanisms, and suggested measures to reduce alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) at the population level, including measures involving the newly formed Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulations.
In St Petersburg, alcohol is not sold during the famous Scarlet Sails Festival. Once again, local governments have the liberty of deciding when there are alcohol sales restrictions. Alcohol consumption and harm seem to have declined in the second half of the first decade of the 21st century in Russia. The decline in consumption and treatment incidence seems to have started in 2004, whereas the decline in other health outcomes and various indicators of mortality started in 2006 with the implementation of the alcohol policy reforms. Corresponding changes can be observed in cause-specific mortality from CVDs and external causes. For men, SDRs from CVD fell by 11.7% between 2005 and 2006 and by 8.7% for the next year, before rising again by 4.5% between 2009 and 2010.
Male mortality from external causes such as injuries and poisonings fell by 12.1% between 2005 and 2006 and by a further 8.73% between 2006 and 2007, and has been declining since then. For women, CVD mortality rates fell by 12.1% between 2005 and 2006 and by 11.6% between 2006 and 2007, rising again between 2009 and 2010 by 6%. Female mortality from external causes decreased by 11% and 10.4% for the years 2006 and 2007, respectively; and has been slightly decreasing since then. Other all-Russian surveys, undertaken by Russia Public Opinion Research Center WCIOM, indicate that beer became very popular during the last decade as beer consumption was reported more often than consumption of vodka or any other alcoholic beverage. Overall, Russia has experienced a number of more or less integrated measures of alcohol policy to reduce consumption and alcohol-attributable harm. Testing the regression model with different time lags confirms that the association between changes in mortality from alcohol poisonings and LE is effectively instantaneous (Appendix S2).
An independent coding was performed of the different core components of the concept and their relations to each other. Each measure of the concept was then assigned to an area of the WHO portfolio, creating a formal evaluation framework. Therefore, the minimum age at which a young person can buy alcohol in Spain stays at 18 as of 2021. Most European Spanish families teach their children that they can enjoy alcohol in moderation. This coincides with safe alcohol limits for adults, which would be no more than one or two drinks per day. In this case, experts define one drink as approximately one can of beer or one glass of wine.
Visual inspection of the association between LE and SDR for alcohol poisoning (Figure (Figure1)1) shows a remarkable mirroring of the trends that can be described as having a ‘butterfly’ shape. However, since the late 2000s, the symmetry between the LE and the alcohol poisoning trends became less apparent. In particular, despite a slowdown in the decline in alcohol poisoning in 2010–2015, life expectancy continued to rise without interruption. To see to what extent our results depend upon the choice of alcohol poisoning as a proxy for the prevalence of harmful drinking, we carried out a sensitivity analysis that included two additional models.
The first Bolshevik government reduced alcohol production (Sheregi, 1986) but by about 1921 consumption had returned to very high levels, in particular spirits distilled illicitly. By 1925, all the restrictions imposed after the revolution were rescinded, after which alcohol-related deaths exceeded their pre-war level, in some cities, such as Moscow, by as much as 15-fold. This decision, together with that to re-establish a state monopoly, was taken, quite explicitly, by Stalin, to raise money and thus avoid the necessity of seeking foreign investment capital. By the 1970s, receipts from alcohol were again constituting a third of government revenues.
As noted earlier, official data from Goskomstat in the 1980s used methods that were classified at the time as ‘state secrets’ but are now known to have used the simple method of assuming that all sugar consumed in excess of 24 kg per person per year went into samogon, and that 75% of samogon came from sugar. This method broke down and was abandoned after 1988 during an acute sugar shortage. Nemstov (1992) has constructed a series of estimates of overall consumption that are thought likely to reflect at least the true situation.
This means grocery stores cannot offer percentages or monetary units (euros) off bulk alcohol purchases. Pubs could also lose their alcohol licenses, and owners maybe could end up in jail if they serve to minors. No vendor can sell to anyone who already has had too much to drink, and no one can drive with more than .05 percent of blood alcohol content in their system. His recent survey of 4,000 people between the ages of 12 to 17 found that one in nine declared they have a “problematic consumption” of alcohol, implying that their health is already suffering.
From time to time, the government would release brief and undocumented references to the fact that annual per capita consumption of alcohol in the Soviet Union was between 2.3 and 3 liters of pure alcohol-one of the lowest rates in the world. This has led many commentators to argue that it is so ingrained as to be impossible to tackle. Certainly, the pattern of drinking observed in Russia is common to many societies in the far north, such as the Finns and the North American Inuit.
His wife, Raisa, who had direct experience of the effects of alcoholism in her family, may have played a major part, but the prime movers are now known to have been two members of the Politburo, Yegor Ligachev and Michael Solomentsev (White, 1996; Service, 1997). They were able to gain acceptance of the policy despite opposition from many other senior politicians. Gorbachev has also suggested that his daughter, Irina Mikhailovna Virginskaya who is a medical doctor, played an important role in convincing him (Gorbachev, 1996).
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