"Parts of Scotland," then. It's a problem common to countries with cold climates. Finland had the same problem until they slapped an unbelievably high tax on liquor, which is why today Tallinn is full of drunk Finns who come across on the ferry to get boozed up.
Your Gorbachev example actually makes my point, because male life expectancy soared during the antialcohol campaign and plummeted immediately after it ended.
Note also that excess deaths in Russia (and Ukraine) are overwhelmingly those of middle-aged men from 45-60 or so. Not women. Not children, young people, or the elderly of either sex. What does that tell you?
If you look at a map of life expectancy figures for Russia (I tried finding one on goskomstat's website but couldn't), what you immediately notice is two things: 1. Life expectancy in Moscow is like 10 years higher than the national average and 2. Muslim regions have way, way higher male life expectancies than either Orthodox or Buddhist ones. (Chechnya actually has the highest, or at least it did a couple of years ago.) While Muslim men in Russia do tend to drink, they tend to do it in much more moderation.
The main reason IMO for the fall in life expectancy after 1991 -- which affected only men -- is that liquor became very cheap. In Soviet days the average monthly income was about 150 rubles and a bottle of vodka cost about 5 rubles, making it very difficult to be drunk all the time.
--- On Thu, 8/27/09, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] let's argue about the cause of mental illness
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, August 27, 2009, 4:15 PM
> But, why did alcoholism start
> going up in Russia to begin with? The decline in life
> expectancy began
> long before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and goes
> back to the
> early 70's. Gorbachev's drive against alcoholism failed.
> The Soviets
> after the mid 20th century never produced consistently
> rising health
> standards like the Cubans have done. Like it or not, but
> the rest of
> the world draws conclusions about Russian society and it's
> health care
> system about the way it's men drink themselves to death.
>
>
>
> And the comparison to Scotland is a bit of a stretch.
> Scotland on
> average is a couple years behind the rest of the UK,
> although there are parts comparable to the worst inner
> cities in the U.S. But, Russia is where Britain was in the
> 1940's!
>
>
>
>
>
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>