In the Irkutsk region, 33 people have already died from poisoning by “Boyaryshnik” (hawthorn tincture), and this is truly a horrific tragedy on a national scale.
Because the real, truthful headline would be: In the Irkutsk region, 33 people died at once from “Boyaryshnik” (hawthorn tincture), and that is why we paid attention. But in fact, this kind of surrogate alcohol is consumed by 10–12 million people, and it kills hundreds every day.
Now Medvedev has finally woken up and is demanding that “measures be taken.” It would have been better if he had woken up after this post of mine about Boyaryshnik being sold through vending machines, or after the hundreds of other articles on the subject.
And we all understand what it means to “take measures.” The Investigative Committee will now issue a press release saying it has launched an inspection of the manufacturers. Then some random guys will be thrown into jail or put under house arrest. A pointless, chaotic campaign will begin. A year from now everyone will have forgotten, the guys will have paid off the right people, they’ll be released pending trial, and then get suspended sentences.
They’ll stop producing hawthorn tincture. Then they’ll start making medicinal chokeberry tincture. Or healing cabbage tincture. Or common geranium tincture. The main thing is that it’s 70% alcohol.
Or, say, bath concentrate.
If that gets banned, it’ll become alcohol-based oven cleaner.
In other words, roughly the same thing will happen as with the Tu-134 aircraft. Medvedev banned them for some reason after a crash that happened because of pilot error. Then it was gradually forgotten, the ban was lifted, and Tu-134s are flying again.
The plane owners paid people off, and now the tincture manufacturers will do the same.
What should be done here?
Sorry for obsessively pushing the same line from my campaign platform again, but the main thing here is fighting poverty.
What kind of alcohol is a person earning 8,000 rubles a month going to drink? Giving up alcohol is not something he is considering, as one of the people’s favorite jokes reminds us:
- Dad, vodka has gotten more expensive. Will you drink less now? - No, son, now you’ll eat less.
If we have 20 million people living in destitution, that is where the 10–12 million people consuming Boyaryshnik come from.
In half the country’s cities, the little parks next to pharmacies look like this:
Obviously, fighting poverty is a long-term measure, but there is no other fundamental solution to this problem.
There is also a short-term measure. But it requires political will, and it is tied to another point in my platform: fighting corruption.
We all understand perfectly well that this entire Boyaryshnik business, with turnover in the billions of rubles, is protected by officials. And that, as with everything involving alcohol, FSB officers and other security-service people have their hands in it. Who is feeding off the EGAIS system (the state alcohol tracking system)? There was a lot of talk about how it would bring order to the alcohol market, but it turned into nothing more than a cash cow for the FSB.
They are exactly the ones who will prevent the obvious restrictive measures from being adopted: a) all such liquids sold in relatively large containers (from 20 ml / 0.7 fl oz and up) must be made fundamentally undrinkable and carry a skull-and-crossbones on the label; b) the price of these “little bottles” and any alcohol sold through pharmacies or household-product channels must be higher than the price of alcohol in stores.
Yes, of course, alcoholics are resourceful. Yes, we remember how in the USSR people purified furniture polish and extracted alcohol from shoe polish. But still, those practices did not involve tens of millions of people.
In summary: for Russia and its national security, the problem of these “little bottles” is roughly a thousand times more important than Syria, Aleppo, Ukraine, and Trump combined.
Every year, Boyaryshnik kills more people than terrorist attacks have in the entire history of Russia.
But talking about Boyaryshnik on the TV shows of Solovyov and Kiselyov (pro-Kremlin television hosts) is not glamorous. There’s no Palmyra, no beautiful footage of explosions, no way to blame Trump. And it is unlikely that Roldugin (the cellist and Putin associate) will play the cello in a clearing strewn with empty little glass bottles.
That is why I do not expect this government to put things in order in this area.