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 hospitalised 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-litre water bottles for 30 lira ($0.85) each, local media said.
By comparison, buying a litre bottle of raki, Turkey’s aniseed-flavoured 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 fuelling 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 percent since 2010, a spectacular increase that cannot be explained by high inflation alone, which has forced up the price faster than wages.