Pubdate:  Wednesday, October 1, 1997
Source:   Halifax Daily News
Contact:   Fake vodka killing more Russian men

 MOSCOW (CP)  Russian men are drinking themselves to death, particularly
 from the poorquality vodka and vile moonshine flooding a lawless liquor
 market.

 "The state must do everything so that the people do not get poisoned by
 fakes," President Boris Yeltsin said in a recent countrywide radio
 address. "Moonshine liquor is the secondbiggest criminal enterprise in
 Russia," after financial swindling, he said.

 Russian men are among the world's heaviest drinkers, by some estimates
 knocking back an average of one halflitre bottle of vodka per day.
 Studies show Russian women tend to drink less.

 Deaths due to alcohol poisoning have skyrocketed since the collapse of the
 Soviet Union brought economic insecurity, high crime rates and greater
 stress to Russian society. "If the people would have good jobs, high wages
 and an optimistic view of the future, they will have no reason to drink,
 or rather, to drink hard and turn into drunkards," said Yeltsin.

 According to a tattletale book by the president's longtime friend and
 bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin himself was a marathon
 bingedrinker until a nearfatal heart attack compelled him to slow down
 last year. About 35,000 Russians, mostly men, died in 1996 from alcohol
 intoxication, roughly triple the 1990 figure.

 The Associated Press reported yesterday that Russian, British and French
 researchers at a Moscow conference released findings that suggest heavy
 drinking is the primary cause of a sharp decline in life expectancy in
 Russia in the early 1990s.  That decline, particularly among men, "is the
 steepest and most severe ever documented anywhere in the world," said
 researcher David Leon of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
 Medicine.  "Basically we have a great increase in the amounts people are
 drinking, combined with a disastrous fall in the quality of what they are
 drinking," says Vladimir Nuzhni, a specialist at the staterun Narcology
 Institute.  When it junked the communist system, Russia also abolished the
 centuriesold state vodka monopoly, allowing almost anyone to produce and
 market alcoholic drinks. "It's completely out of control," says Nuzhni.

 "Moonshiners make perfect imitations of legitimate products, right down to
 labels and excise stamps. The only thing that's bad is the drink inside
 the bottle, which can do you serious harm." The wave of bathtub liquor has
 also deprived the cashstrapped government of one of its biggest sources
 of revenue. Yeltsin said the state is getting only a fraction of the taxes
 it should from liquor production and sales.  Nuzhni estimates more than 50
 per cent of all vodka for sale in Russia's street kiosks and open markets
 is fake.  "Most counterfeit vodka is just water mixed with grain spirits,
 which won't kill you," he says.  "On the other hand, some of the vodka
 produced in regular factories is polluted with heavy metals or methyl
 spirits and is very dangerous.  Standards are very low, and there is
 almost no enforcement these days." Many Russian men insist they can spot
 the difference between good and bad vodka on sight.  Some say they can
 tell by shaking the bottle and counting the bubbles, or by holding it up
 to light and watching how the rays refract.