The Estonian government plans to raise taxes on alcohol next year as the small Baltic nation of 1.3 million is struggling with a drink problem. The BBC's Baltic correspondent Laura Sheeter examines the effects of heavy drinking in Estonia and neighbouring Finland, where Baltic booze cruises remain popular. Grey-faced patients barely respond to the doctors and nurses treating them in intensive care at the North Estonian regional hospital. Many of them are here because of alcohol.
Heavy drinking is widespread in Estonia, which comes near the top of EU rankings for alcohol consumption. On average each Estonian drinks 12 litres of pure alcohol each year - and every year they are drinking more. Experts warn that if the trend continues, alcohol will contribute to an irreversible population decline.
The tax hike may sound like good news, but anti-alcohol campaigners say it is unlikely to help. The government, they say, has kept taxes low for years to boost economic growth, despite rising alcohol consumption. They argue that it is only raising taxes now because it is not planning to join the eurozone soon, so it is no longer worried about a tax rise pushing up inflation.
At the Ministry of Social Affairs, they are barely more optimistic. Chief public health officer Andrus Lipand says the government asked for a national alcohol strategy, but his proposals to limit sales and advertising are simply being ignored. "Our government supports a so-called liberal alcohol policy. It's a conflict between health and business, and at the moment business is winning."
Yet the Estonian tax hike has been welcomed on the other side of the Baltic Sea, by the Finnish government. When Estonia joined the EU in 2004, the Finns, worried that people would travel to Tallinn to buy cheap liquor, cut their own alcohol tax. But the plan did not work. Finns just started drinking more. Hundreds of thousands of them catch the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn and return home with crates of cheap booze.
In the last three years there has been a sharp rise in alcohol-related diseases and crime in Finland, and drink has become the country's number one cause of death among adults. Now, encouraged by the Estonian tax rise, the Finnish government has announced that taxes will go up there too.
Shoppers on one weekend ferry had mixed feelings about the rise. Some wanted to see an altogether more liberal alcohol policy in Finland, while others said they were worried about heavy drinking in Finland - but none of them thought it would stop them shopping in Estonia. One told me that if the price got too high, he would just go to nearby Latvia instead.
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There's loyalty for you. And I was about to say how nice it is to see that Finland and Estonia still share such strong ties. For the full text of the article, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6957153.stm.
2 comments:
I am reading this post extremely hungover. I question the whole: let's raise taxes on booze so that people will drink less. I mean, seriously, who says I was going to have 12 beers, but now I'll stop at 10 because with the new taxes I can't afford that extra 10 kroons? Once you're drunk, you just drink. Or if you live in a small city you make your own booze for free . . . and then you read about the deaths in the paper when people accidentally make poison . . .
I don't think my comments are very constructive. What should Estonia and Finland do? Create diversions for alcoholics. Like free movie nights. Something that people can do for fun instead of drink till they pass out. Yeah, right, like anyone would go to a free movie night sober . . .
Speaking of, I need to sober up.
Well, if they seriously wanted to address it as a social and health problem and were actually concerned about their citizens, the government would stop selling and marketing alcohol like soda and maybe set up a state monopoly, kind of like in Sweden or wherever. That might help. Who knows though.
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