TWO FORTHCOMING reports are set to highlight a burgeoning alcohol problem in Cyprus, which has driven up road deaths and is increasing rehab clinic admissions by up to 20 per cent.
The 2011 traffic police report will show alcohol has continued to be the leading cause of car crashes and road deaths. The report shows road collisions caused by drink-drivers increased from 17 per cent in 2006 and 2007 to 43 per cent in 2010. In 2011, 23 died in alcohol related road accidents.
Meanwhile, preliminary data from a European wide European School survey project on alcohol and other drugs (ESPAD) study which is due in May shows the number of school age students in Cyprus who regularly drank in 2011 has risen by around 10 per cent since 2007.
These trends have been echoed in other EU countries such as the UK, where the government is now mulling minimum pricing for alcohol as part of a wider strategy to discourage heavy drinking. The Scottish government has already tabled a minimum pricing bill to end the sale of alcohol at “pocket money prices”, while British Prime Minister David Cameron favours a similar move for England and Wales. Price increases are among the measures under consideration when the British government’s alcohol strategy is released next month.
The government here has no plans to consider a price increase despite the widespread availability of cheap alcohol and growing evidence that alcohol problems are on the increase. “We know that alcohol abuse is on the increase, but what can we do about it? Abuse of alcohol in nightclubs is not in the health ministry’s portfolio,” Health Minister Stavros Malas told the Sunday Mail in an interview.
Malas also disagreed that raising the price of alcohol, as may well happen in Britain, would have any effect.
“If you increase the tax on alcohol, you will achieve no reduction [in consumption] because it will come from the north,” he said.
The positive correlation between alcohol pricing and alcohol abuse, however, has been well documented. An EU wide report by the UK-based Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), for example, stated quite categorically that cheap drink increases consumption.
“When it comes to alcohol’s affordability, the way drinkers respond to changes is similar to their responses to other consumer product s… The more affordable alcohol is, the more it is consumed and the less affordable it is, the less it is consumed,” the report said. Since joining the EU, the price of imported alcohol in Cyprus has plummeted.
A Sunday Mail investigation into supermarket prices showed some stores will sell a litre of whisky for less than €5 and a 24 pack of 330ml beers for €6.90.
The average promotion price of a 700ml bottle of name brand whisky was under €14, with the cheapest on offer for €4.50 and the most expensive for €35. A litre of Absolut vodka is widely available for less than €10, while less well-known names sell for as little as €5.
The low prices are largely thanks to the low taxes (zero for wine, €4.78 per 100 litres of pure alcohol in beer, and €598 per 100 litres of pure alcohol in spirits).
For now, however, there are no plans within the finance ministry to increase prices. Although such a measure would provide much-needed state revenue during the present economic crisis, a price hike would face strong opposition from conservative drinkers and the powerful hospitality industry.
“We did discuss the possibility of raising duties on items like alcohol, but this is no longer within the horizon of political discussion,” a finance ministry source told the Sunday Mail.
The ministry’s view seems to be that the neither the scale of the financial crisis nor health concerns warrant a tax hike yet, but they may reconsider with more comprehensive data or more dire economic circumstances.
The lack of data is an important issue. The government has no official data on excessive drinking, and therefore no coherent strategy for managing the healthcare consequences.
Yet, the police’s statistics and the ESPAD study both indicate a worrying increase in alcohol consumption.
ESPAD project co-ordinator (also a neurologist, psychiatrist and rehab clinic owner) Kyriakos Veresies has also noticed a shift in drinking habits. “There are no official statistics, but from empirical observation there are several trends.”
Apart from the 10 to 20 per cent annual increase in admissions to his clinic in recent years Veresies said: “The ratio (of men to women’s alcohol consumption) used to be eight to two but now it is more like seven to three.”
Today’s drinkers are also adopting habits more typical of north Europeans: “People are no longer drinking with food, but before their dinners to get high. They are using alcohol like a drug,” he said.
Clinical psychiatrist and co-ordinator of the mental health services alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation unit (THEMEA), Lampros Samartzis agreed. “There is an increase in the life prevalence of alcohol consumption,” he said, although he added that for now Cypriots still drink less than the European average.
A growing tendency to binge drink – which means having more than five drinks in one go – was documented in ESPAD’s 2007 report and is expected to have increased.
While this is likely to pose health risks to Cypriots in the long term (the EU says harmful alcohol use is the third biggest cause of early death and illness) the short term effects, highlighted by the traffic police’s 2011 report, are likely to spark most concerns.
“Alcohol has been the number one cause of fatal accidents on the roads since 2007, with victims having on average 220 milligrams of alcohol in their blood, where the limit is 50 (mg),” traffic police chief Demetris Demetriou said. “We have a big problem – especially with foreigners.”
To tackle the problem, police have increased the number of checks and launched an information campaign, giving lectures and sending leaflets in 11 languages to the CTO and embassies to distribute.
In 2011, they stopped 172,000 drivers and arrested 8,749 who were over the limit.
While this was around 9 per cent less than the 9,306 caught in 2010, Demetriou stressed that this reflects the number of police checks, not the total number of transgressors, and that Cyprus has a long way to go before it reaches the EU target of a 50 per cent reduction in fatal accidents between 2010 and 2020.
“If we increase the number of checks we will increase the number of people we find who are under the influence.”
