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Czech Republic Bans Alcohol Sales After Bootleg Liquor Kills 19

Czech Republic's Lively Drinking Culture At Risk
Czech Republic's Lively Drinking Culture At Risk
Martin Plichta

PRAGUE – The Czechs have a strong taste for alcohol. They are the world's foremost beer drinkers, and rank second for drinking hard liquor, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

This love of alcohol has taken a tragic turn with the appearance on the Czech market of large quantity of adulterated vodka and rum. Since August 7, 19 people have died in the Czech Republic of methanol poisoning after drinking cheap, bootleg liquor. Thirty more have been hospitalized; most of these have become permanently blind and are in artificial comas, in critical condition.

The Czech health minister, Leos Heger, is worried that the death toll will continue to rise, even though since September 12, the government has requisitioned inspectors, customs officers and the police to track down the producers and distributors of the ersatz alcohol.

The wave of alcohol poisoning, the worst in 30 years, has been especially serious in the underdeveloped northeast of the country. Eleven deaths and half the hospitalizations have occurred in the Ostrava region. There have also been deaths and emergency hospitalizations in central Bohemia and Prague. Most of the victims are older than 55, but the youngest is 21. Half the victims are women.

The government decided last week to ban all sales of alcohol by the glass in the innumerable small snack stands, food stalls and cafes of the Czech Republic. Last Friday, Mr. Heger widened the ban to include all alcohol sold in shops, restaurants and hotels. The penalties for serving alcohol, or even for not removing bottles from the shelves, are severe and include heavy fines and prison terms.

Customs officers and business inspectors have also launched an operation to check all the stocks of alcohol in the whole country in order to identify the provenance of each product. After three days of inspections, several thousand bottles have already been seized that show neither the required tax stamps nor labels by legally recognized producers.

Illegal distilleries

In the town of Zlin, in southeastern Moravia, where several people died, police have discovered a warehouse with 500 liters of adulterated alcohol in a housing project garage. An illegal distillery with 5000 liters of alcohol was also discovered near Ostrava, the country’s third largest city. Police have begun a vast hunt for alcohol traffickers in the region, which borders Poland and Slovakia.

At first stunned by this wave of alcohol poisoning deaths, rare in Europe, the Czech media have now begun to ask vexing questions. Although liquor manufacturers and importers have been raising the alarm for several years about the soaring black market for alcohol in the Czech Republic, the government had not taken any measures against it, even though the black market has cost the state a great deal of tax revenue. Since the sharp increase in taxes in 2010, revenue has fallen by a third, but not alcohol consumption. The conservative government's budgetary rigor led it to reduce drastically the number of health, safety and business inspectors, and to concentrate most of its monitoring on foreign distributors. This gave restaurant, bar and liquor store owners almost total freedom to traffic in alcohol.

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eyes on the U.S.

A Foreign Eye On America's Stunning Drop In Life Expectancy

Over the past two years, the United States has lost more than two years of life expectancy, wiping out 26 years of progress. French daily Les Echos investigates the myriad of causes, which are mostly resulting in the premature deaths of young people.

Image of a person holding the national flag of the United States in front of a grave.

A person holding the national flag of the United States in front of a grave.

Hortense Goulard


On May 6, a gunman opened fire in a Texas supermarket, killing eight people, including several children, before being shot dead by police. Particularly bloody, this episode is not uncommon in the U.S.: it is the 22nd mass killing (resulting in the death of more than four people) this year.

Gun deaths are one reason why life expectancy is falling in the U.S. But it's not the only one. Last December, the American authorities confirmed that life expectancy at birth had fallen significantly in just two years: from 78.8 years in 2019, it would be just 76.1 years in 2021.

The country has thus dropped to a level not reached since 1996. This is equivalent to erasing 26 years of progress.Life expectancy has declined in other parts of the world as a result of the pandemic, but the U.S. remains the developed country with the steepest decline — and the only one where this trend has not been reversed with the advent of vaccines. Most shocking of all: this decline is linked above all to an increase in violent deaths among the youngest members of the population.

Five-year-olds living in the U.S. have a one in 25 chance of dying before their 40th birthday, according to calculations by The Financial Times. For other developed countries, including France, this rate is closer to one in 100. Meanwhile, the life expectancy of a 75-year-old American differs little from that of other OECD countries.

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