Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 03:28:55 -0400 From: "pms" <laflame at aaahawk.com> Subject: Re: working class
So despite all these Soviet practices we had decades of jokes about drunks and drinking in the USSR? Alchohol is cheaper now? I spent '95 in south Florida where the beer at least is incredibly cheap and I remember thinking, no wonder they can get all these guys to sell the newspaper in the middle of every major highway? Labor's cheap when it's hung over.
Me:
You also had jokes about how East European women look like men, which, I can tell you, is emphatically not the case.
Alcohol is much cheaper now and much more readily available. It is often also of wretched quality at the low end, which results in a lot of deaths from alcohol poisoning. In the villages, they make their own moonshine -- this was totally illegal during the Soviet era and would, like I said, put you in prison tout de suite. If you were an alcoholic in the USSR, the CP would put you in a treatment program. Now, nobody will stop you and you can just continue on in your miserable existence.
Russia has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world, though per capita alcohol consumption is higher in Finland, Germany and France.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal