Deaths linked to contraband alcohol reignite debate on alcohol tax in Türkiye

With 38 deaths in four days and 26 in intensive care after consuming contraband alcohol in Istanbul, the politically charged debate over rising alcohol taxes in Turkey has returned to center stage.

The rising death toll has grabbed headlines in Turkey, a nominally secular country where alcohol taxes have risen sharply under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim who vehemently opposes alcohol consumption. alcohol.

Since Monday, 92 people have been hospitalized after drinking alcohol contaminated with methanol, a toxic substance that can cause blindness, liver damage and death.

More than a third died.

Some bought alcohol from a business posing as a Turkmen restaurant in Istanbul, which sold it in half-liter bottles of water for 30 lira ($0.85) each, according to local media.

For comparison, buying a one-liter bottle of raki, Turkey's national aniseed liqueur, in a supermarket costs about 1,300 lira ($37.20) in a country where the minimum wage recently rose to $600.

These prices, higher and increasing than in the European Union, fuel the production of moonshine.

“We lose at least 500 lives a year to counterfeit alcohol. It's a massacre, it's a massacre and it's caused by taxes!” » raged Wednesday Mustafa Adiguzel, a deputy from the main opposition party, the CHP.

“We must tackle exorbitant alcohol prices,” he told parliament, dominated by Erdogan’s Islamo-conservative AKP.

Erdogan, who said nothing about the wave of deaths, quickly responded, denouncing the CHP as the party “whose biggest promise is to make raki prices cheaper.”

– “Easy money” –

Poisoning due to adulterated alcohol is relatively common in Türkiye, where clandestine and private production is widespread.

Cagin Tan Eroglu, co-head of an organization that monitors public alcohol policies, says the number of deaths is “gradually increasing” due to tax hikes that occur every six months.

His organization relies on figures published in the media to count cases of poisoning.

Last year, 48 people died in Istanbul after drinking contaminated alcohol, the governor's office said. Contacted by AFP, the Ministry of Health did not give a national figure.

“Taxes allow the government to collect easy money while politically oppressing a certain lifestyle,” Eroglu said.

“But people are dying because of irresponsible, clearly ideologically driven policies.”

The raki tax, introduced when Erdogan's AKP came to power in 2002, has jumped more than 2,500 percent since 2010, a dramatic increase that cannot be explained solely by high inflation , which caused prices to rise faster than wages.

“Almost 70 percent of a bottle. This doesn't happen in any other country,” said Ozgur Aybas, president of the association representing so-called Tekel stores that sell alcohol.

The situation in Turkey is such that “today you can be served contaminated alcohol even in the most upscale restaurants,” he said.

“The government's bad policy is entirely responsible for the deaths of these people,” he told AFP, saying people who drink alcohol “are treated like second-class citizens.”

– 'Terrorists' –

However, these price increases only affect a minority in Türkiye.

Although alcohol is more widely available in Türkiye than in most Muslim-majority countries, only 12.1% report drinking it.

And there is a stark gender difference, with 18.4 percent of men drinking, compared to just 5.9 percent of women, according to figures from the Turkish Statistics Institute.

The government has not responded publicly to the recent wave of deaths in Istanbul, although several European countries have put in place travel advisories warning of the dangers of counterfeit alcohol in Turkey.

“We continue to increase the price of alcohol and cigarettes… but they don't stop consuming them,” Erdogan said in 2022. He has made great efforts to promote ayran, a popular drink made from yogurt, as a national drink alternative to raki. .

Such regular remarks and diatribes against “drunks” have only “widened and exacerbated the sociocultural and political divisions that beset Turkey,” said Emine Evered, a historian and author of a recent book on alcohol in Turkey. since the Ottoman Empire.

After several arrests this week following the latest poisoning scandal, the Istanbul governorate said: “Those who cause death by producing or selling counterfeit alcohol are no different from terrorists.”

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