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 Turkish 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 one-third have died.
Photo: AFP
Some bought alcohol from a business posing as a Turkmen restaurant in Istanbul that was selling it in half-liter water bottles for 30 lira (US$0.85) each, local media reported.
By comparison, buying a liter bottle of raki, Turkey’s aniseed-flavored national liquor, from a supermarket costs about 1,300 lira in a country where the minimum wage recently rose to US$600.
Such prices, which are higher than in the EU 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,” Turkish lawmaker Mustafa Adiguzel, of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said on Wednesday.
“We have to address the exorbitant prices of alcohol,” he told the Turkish Grand National Assembly, which is dominated by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (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.”
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, said 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, while the Turkish Ministry of Health did not provide a national figure when contacted.
“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 soared more than 2,500 percent since 2010, an 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 an 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 said, adding that people who drink alcohol “are treated like second-class citizens.”
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 percent say they drink it, and there is a marked difference between the sexes, with 18.4 percent of men drinking, compared with only 5.9 percent of women, Turkish Statistical Institute figures showed.
The government has not reacted publicly to the recent wave of deaths in Istanbul, although several European nations have issued travel advisories 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 yogurt-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 that “those who cause death by producing or selling counterfeit alcohol are no different than terrorists.”
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
RSS