Geoalcoholics – Russia’s unhappy truth1 min read
Earlier this month, we posted about Russia’s heavy alcohol consumption levels as a follow up to our Healthy Planet Index. It turns out that Russians may be what Alex De Jonge has called “geoalcoholics” in his book “Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union.”
This discovery all stemmed (no pun intended) from a link that Tyler Cowan posted on the Marginal Revolution blog. It turns out that Europe has three fairly distinct alcohol belts – wine to the south, beer in the middle and vodka up north. Much can be explained from climate and history, and the post on Strange Maps says it all, or at least a lot. There is always more at Wikipedia, but I love the Terry Pratchett quotation and comment at the end of the Strange Maps post, “Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it. And grapes, grain and potatoes.”
Whoever could have known that a belt of alcohol was more than just a drink?
Thank you for taking the time to reveal this information to us all. It was indeed very useful and informative while being straight forward and to the point.
The arena of dependence counselling has fought with how to understand and handle addiction for decades. For some, addiction is best understood as a disease that can respond to the regular treatment of detox, group work and self-help programmes, AA in particular, that focus principally on addictive conduct. For others, addiction is a behavior driven by inherent battles and issues that need to be embraced in a treatment process planned for every soul, one that references his/her peculiar fundamental psychological dynamics.
This is a worth while article, thanks for sharing. Alcoholism is not an issue that’s going away anytime soon.