Bootleg liquor deaths revive debate on Turkey alcohol tax

ISTANBUL (AFP) — With 38 people dead in four days and 26 in intensive care after drinking bootleg liquor in Istanbul, the politically charged debate over Turkey’s soaring alcohol taxes has swung back into the spotlight.

The rising death toll made headlines in Turkey, a nominally secular country where alcohol taxes have risen sharply under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim who vociferously opposes drinking.

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

More than a third have died.

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

By comparison, buying a liter bottle of raki, Turkey’s aniseed-flavored national liquor, from a supermarket costs around 1,300 lira ($37.20) in a country where the minimum wage recently rose to $600.

Such prices, which are higher than in the European Union and rising, are fueling the production of moonshine.

“We are losing at least 500 lives a year as a result of counterfeit alcohol. It’s a massacre, it’s mass murder and it’s caused by the taxes!” raged Mustafa Adiguzel, a lawmaker from the main opposition CHP party on Wednesday.

“We have to address the exorbitant prices of alcohol,” he told Parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s Islamo-conservative AKP.

Erdogan, who has said nothing about the wave of deaths, quickly hit back, denouncing the CHP as the party “whose greatest promise it to make raki prices cheaper.”

‘Easy money’

Poisonings from adulterated alcohol are relatively common in Turkey, where clandestine and private productions are widespread.

Cagin Tan Eroglu, who co-runs an organization that monitors public policies on alcohol, says the number of deaths “is gradually increasing” as a result of the tax hikes that take place every six months.

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

Last year, 48 people died in Istanbul after drinking tainted alcohol, the governor’s office said. Contacted by AFP, the health ministry did not give a national figure.

“The taxes allow the government to collect easy money while politically oppressing a certain lifestyle,” Eroglu said. “But people are dying because of irresponsible policies that are obviously ideologically driven.”

The tax on raki, brought in when Erdogan’s AKP came to power in 2002, has jumped by more than 2,500% since 2010, a spectacular increase that cannot be explained by high inflation alone, which has forced up the price faster than wages.

“Nearly 70 percent of a bottle. This does not happen in any other country,” said Ozgur Aybas, head of the association representing so-called Tekel shops that sell alcohol.

Such is the situation in Turkey that “today you could be served tainted alcohol in even the most high-end restaurants,” he said.

“The government’s bad policies are entirely to blame for the death of these people,” he told AFP, saying people who drink alcohol “are treated like second-class citizens.”

‘Terrorists’

However such price hikes affect only a minority in Turkey.

Although alcohol is more widely available in Turkey than in most Muslim-majority nations, only 12.1% say they drink it.

And there is a marked difference between the sexes, with 18.4% of men drinking, compared with only 5.9% of women, Turkish Statistics Institute figures show.

The government has not reacted publicly to the recent wave of deaths in Istanbul, though several European nations have travel advisories in place warning of the dangers of counterfeit alcohol in Turkey.

“We keep increasing the price of alcohol and cigarettes … but they don’t stop consuming,” Erdogan said in 2022. He has gone to great lengths to promote ayran, a yoghurt-based drink, as an alternative national tipple to raki.

Such remarks and regular diatribes against “drunks” has only served “to widen and exacerbate the sociocultural and political rifts that beset Turkey,” said Emine Evered, a historian and author of a recent book on alcohol in Turkey since the Ottoman Empire.

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

—

By REMI BANET with BURCIN GERCEK in Ankara, Agence France-Presse