No strangers to heavy drinking, but many in Russia feel that it has gotten out of control with a report showing alcohol consumption tripled in recent years.
“The Moscow Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry says Russia has 2.5 million registered alcoholics, but adds the real figure is seven times higher — more than 10 percent of Russia’s population of 142 million.” ~ Yahoo.com
So why are some in the motherland getting their babushkas in a wad over a designer vodka marketed to women when one in ten is already an alcoholic? Seems to me that complaining about a single label is the equivalent of punching the blind guy in a bar brawl. It’s a red herring for those that feel they need to do something about a deadly problem yet lack the determination to address the bigger problem.
We got much of the same kind of stir going on in my own “motherland”, sweet home Alabama.
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The Alabama state legislature has approved a measure that would allow an increase in the alcohol content of beer from 6% to almost 14%. Beer aficionados say this will allow Alabamians to enjoy many imports and specialty brews now denied under our current system, but the legislation is frowned on by some who believe it will increase drunkenness.
Opponents of allowing higher alcohol content beer cite practical, as well as theological, reasons. The Rev. Dan Ireland of the group Alabama’s Moral Compass has warned lawmakers that allowing high-alcohol beer in the state will make it easier for teenagers to get drunk. ~ UPI.com
A member of the state legislature even went as far as comparing the dangers of high alcohol content beverages to that of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We continue to support something that’s killing more of our young people in one year than we’ve had killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in a couple of years,” said Rep. Richard Laird (D-Roanoke). ~ Jointogether.org
This just irritates me to no end! Not because he is wrong, but because he is so right. Already alcohol and drugs kill so many of our young people, all people, and yet we don’t seem to care much except about not wanting it to get worse.
This flap over Russia’s designer vodka or Alabama’s turbo charged beer is just avoidance of the real issue; Close to 100,000 deaths a year in our country alone are directly attributed to alcohol and the number is thought to be even greater in Russia, yet people are going gaga over the finer points of distribution and marketing. My advice is to these advocates is to save their breath on the specifics. Instead try to educate the public on the existing danger and misery inherent to alcohol consumption, and to start chipping away at the glorified and romanticized pedestal on which our cultures have placed alcohol.
