Putin urged to address "Russia's curse".

find the drinks he craved. Any grocery store or roadside kiosk had just what he was looking for. Perfume, brake fluid, de-icer, methylated spirits, toilet cleaner, nail varnish remover: “I drank them all”, says Kuznetsov, who is 53 years old. “Everything that burns.” Like many Russian alcoholics, the former laser specialist from a top Moscow physics institute slithered into his darkest drinking days during the turmoil of Perestroika. He gave up his prestigious job, was rejected by his family, and ended up sleeping on the floor of a filthy apartment without a stick of furniture. And when Gorbachev restricted alcohol sales he turned to the hard stuff. “I only survived because I got poisoned by some chemical cleaning agent quite early on and I couldn’t drink it any more”, he remembers. “After that I stuck to cologne.” An estimated 500 000 Russians die each year for alcohol-related reasons, a figure that covers 30% of all male deaths (including murders and accidents). Vodka and other hard spirits remain the swig of choice, encompassing three-quarters of official consumption, compared with less than a fifth in the UK. The average Russian drinks 12–15 L of hard spirits every year, while poverty forces many drinkers to resort to the “surrogate” alcohols that sated Kuznetsov’s thirst. In his annual address last year, President Vladimir Putin described the heavy toll that alcohol is taking on his country, decimating “young men, who are breadwinners for their families”. Even the old stalwart of anti-alcoholism, Mikhail Gorbachev, recently spoke up and voiced his concern. “We are approaching a catastrophically high figure of spirits consumption”, he told one interviewer. “The country . . . is killing itself.” As President Putin takes over the presidency of the G8 industrialised countries this month, he is being urged to transform his concern into concrete action and tackle “Russia’s curse”. The World Bank called for action last month, finding alcoholism plays a major part in falling male life expectancy—already down to an alarming 58 years old. Russia’s fondness for drink is nothing new. Production—and consumption— of vodka first became common in the 15th century because of increasing grain yields brought about by the introduction of new crop rotation methods. Chronicles from the ensuing centuries show villagers swung between abstinence and wild drinking bouts that could last for days during festivals. The Tsars recognised alcohol’s damaging effect but were reluctant to hinder production: in the 18th and 19th centuries it provided a third to a half of the treasury’s indirect tax revenue. Fast-forward to 2006 and little has changed. Alcohol is big business, with a spirits market worth an estimated £7 billion (US$12·3 billion) per year. Holidays such as New Year and Orthodox Christmas, this month, are still a traditional time for mammoth benders, or “drinking without drying out”. Whole bottles of vodka are regularly downed around kitchen tables. And, all too often, poverty and stress push hard drinking over the edge into alcoholism. With the help of a twelve-step recovery programme Kuznetsov is now in control of his illness. “I can manage, one day at a time”, he says. Yet millions remain trapped by the disease and new research suggests worrying trends in consumption. A recent report by Russia’s National Alcohol Association found an increasing chunk of market share is taken by cheap and potentially lethal “surrogate” alcohols. The effects are apparent from the growing frequency of tragic stories in the Russian press. In November, 33 people were killed in Magadan by a single batch of drinks contaminated with methanol. Shops in Krasnoyarsk World Report