The mayor mulls over a dry law. Will it help?
“If I sign a ban on selling alcohol today, what will our city’s guests think of us?” Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky asked this rhetorical question at a recent meeting of the Kyiv City Administration. The mayor thinks it would be a good idea to ban the sale of liquor throughout the capital, starting with Khreshchatyk Street. Kyiv is home to over 20,000 registered alcoholics and about 10,000 drug addicts. With few exceptions, most of them are people of working age: drugs are used from the age of 15 and on the average, heavy drinking is common until 55.
In his report presented at the meeting Roman Makomela, chief of the Main Directorate of Public Health, cast doubt on these statistics. “I do not trust these figures and advise you to do the same: to get the real picture, you must inflate them by three or even five times,” said the chief, noting that the main causes of the spread of this plague are unreliable data and inadequate efforts to prevent the consumption of harmful substances.
It is no secret that alcohol is often more accessible to the consumer than juice or milk. Psychoactive substances can easily be found almost anywhere — night clubs and discotheques, schools and universities. The past few years have seen the growing consumption of alcohol in restaurants and bars, rather than in courtyards and house entrances. Light alcohol drinks are also gaining in popularity: official sources claim that young people try to get sloshed even with these kinds of beverages.
Makomela named only five medical prevention and treatment institutions in Kyiv that can admit 30 to 40 people. Is this a sufficient number of hospital beds for a city where the number of alcohol abusers has reached tens of thousands? The report says that prevention work is so unsuccessful that one of the main reasons why students take to the bottle is curiosity (“I wonder what it will be like”) and lack of activities in their spare time (“I was bored”).
The mayor was not simply dissatisfied with the report from the Main Directorate of Public Health but indignant. “All that you’ve read here does not mean a thing. Who needs your concept if it doesn’t work? I need specific steps — now!” Chernovetsky said. During the meeting it became clear that the directorate doesn’t know its best or worst fighters against drug abuse and alcoholism. Makomela maintained a discreet silence about hotline calls (there are reportedly two such lines in the directorate) and failed to name a single concrete measure aimed at even a partial reduction of alcohol consumption. The only thing that the participants were able to “wrest” from Makomela was that there is a waiting list in hospitals for abusers.
“And why are drugs circulating in schools? Who are the people who bring the dope to schools? What hotline information stirred up your interest?” the mayor kept asking. “Who is going to call you? Nobody trusts you.”
In the end, Chernovetsky said that Mukomela has three days to draw up a report on specific work and then he is free to hand in his resignation. Concluding the meeting, he announced that he had signed an instruction to raise the salaries of the city hall staff. “We will be very glad if Kyiv residents begin to call the hotline and tell us which official helped them. The best will be paid bonuses,” said Chernovetsky.
However, he did not specify what will be done with those that have been the targets of complaints. As for alcoholism, Chernovetsky signed an instruction during the session — maybe the one banning the sale of alcohol on Khreshchetyk. Will it help? We asked some of The Day’s experts.
COMMENTARY
Oleksandr HUBENKO, Ph.D. (Psychology), editor-in-chief of the journal Practical Psychology and Social Work:
“This kind of decision says more about the loss of a sense of reality than the desire to combat alcoholism. We have already undergone ‘shock therapy’ at the hands of Comrade Yegor Ligachev, which produced no good results. An abrupt cut in alcohol sales does not take human mentality into account: no efforts were made to explain the need to reduce consumption.
“Obviously, this will trigger protests. It should first be explained why something must not be done and then you can appeal to people’s minds and hearts. In our situation, the ban on alcohol sales will probably boost consumption — illegally at that. You can well imagine how this will affect our fledgling market economy. This is an ill-considered strategic step on the part of Leonid Chernovetsky.
“We can say that moderate consumption of alcohol is our national tradition, and the mayor may thus antagonize a large number of his voters and sympathizers. It would be correct and logical to conduct a broad campaign of street advertising and TV commercials, which could persuade people to stop abusing alcohol and, in any case, would prevent protests.”
