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Turkey’s alcohol tax under scrutiny after bootleg liquor deaths

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With 38 dead in four days and 46 receiving hospital treatment after drinking bootleg liquor in İstanbul, the politically-charged debate over Turkey’s soaring alcohol taxes is once again in the spotlight.

The rising death toll in this latest episode of such poisoning made headlines in Turkey, a nominally secular country where alcohol taxes have risen sharply under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a pious Muslim who vociferously opposes drinking.

Several of the victims died after consuming alcohol purchased from a business posing as a Turkmen restaurant which was selling it in half-liter water bottles for 30 lira ($0.85) each, local media reports said.

By comparison, buying a liter bottle of rakı, Turkey’s aniseed-flavored national liquor, from a supermarket costs 1,300 lira ($37.20) a liter in a country where the minimum wage recently rose to 22,104 lira ($620).

Such prices, which are higher than those in the European Union and rising, are fueling the production of counterfeit alcohol products, often produced with toxic ingredients.

“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 Adıgüzel, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) party on Wednesday.

“We have to address the exorbitant prices of alcohol,” he told parliament which is dominated by Erdoğan’s Islamo-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP).

‘Easy money’

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

Çağın Tan Eroğlu, 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, which take place every six months.

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

Last year, 48 people died in İstanbul after drinking tainted alcohol, the governor’s office said. Contacted by Agence France-Presse, the health ministry did not provide a national figure.

“The taxes allow the government to collect easy money while politically oppressing a certain lifestyle,” said Eroğlu.

“But people are dying because of irresponsible policies that are obviously ideologically driven.”

A tax on rakı initiated when Erdoğan’s AKP came to power in 2002 has increased by more than 2,500 percent since 2010, a spectacular hike that can’t be explained by high inflation alone, which has forced the price up faster than wage increases.

“Nearly 70 percent of a bottle. This does not happen in any other country,” said Özgür Aybaş, head of the association representing the state 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 only affect a minority in Turkey.

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

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

The government has not reacted publicly to the recent wave of deaths in İstanbul, although 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,” said Erdoğan in 2022, a leader who has gone to great lengths to promote ayran, a yogurt-based non-alcoholic drink, as an alternative national drink to rakı.

Such remarks and regular diatribes against “drunks” has only serve “to widen and exacerbate the sociocultural and political rifts that beset Turkey,” said historian Emine Evered, 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.”

© Agence France-Presse

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