Medvedev Set To Tackle Alcohol

Demographics are a hot topic in Russia. A Russian woman can today expect to live into her mid-70s, a stat roughly on par with life expectancies for women in Western Europe and the United States. Life expectancies for Russian men are a different story altogether - the average Russian man will die just before his 60th birthday, a statistic more in line with the Third World rather than the First. What's the reason behind the dramatically shorter lifespans of Russian men? According to the British medical journal, The Lancet, excessive alcohol and tobacco use. Alcohol-related diseases, the Lancet reports, account for half the deaths of Russians between the ages of 15 and 54. Andrei Demin, of the Public Health Association, an NGO in Moscow, says that the average Russian adult drinks 50 bottles of vodka a year.

President Dmitry Medvedev, apparently, has had enough. He's been on a PR crusade in the past few months to encourage his countrymen to moderate their alcohol intake, but so far has seen few results from his campaign. So now he's ordering his government to work on new laws that would put restrictions on alcohol use and sales.

The Soviet Union's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried something similar, cutting vodka production while simultaneously hiking prices, and was roundly hated for it. Besides, the man-on-the-street critics say, Russians kept drinking anyway - in some cases poisonous homebrews of industrial alcohols that killed would-be tipplers. But Medvedev recently has praised Gorbachev's efforts, pointing out that it did help to at least temporarily boost Russia's sagging demographics.

Taking on Russia's love of drink is another area where Medvedev is wading into an issue that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin acknowledged but avoided. The Public Health Association's Demin notes that during his time as president, Putin put the issue of alcohol and tobacco abuse on his political agenda, but did little about either and never slapped serious taxes on either substance (a move all sides seem to agree would reduce usage). Even as Moscow has become one of the world's most expensive cities, a pack of cigarettes can still be bought for as little as 30 cents, a bottle of beer for under a dollar.