'alcohol' - tagged features

But if the Blue Train isn’t your idea of a holiday outing – you might be thumbing through a stack of charter travel brochures – that’s a typical thing for a Swede to do – and this time of year – they’re all off looking for a bit of sun. But how do the Swedes behave when they’re far from home? Do Sweden’s restrictive alcohol laws encourage liquor-fuelled benders abroad? Radio Sweden’s George Wood asked Lisa Lenneman from one of Sweden’s largest tour operators. 

British men are content to self-medicate when in need of relaxation and for large numbers of them on stag-weekends that means picking up a cheap flight to Krakow in Poland! The beer’s cheap, the hotels are cheap, and, until recently at least, the local population greeted them warmly. To give the uninitiated an idea of what the British stag weekend is – groups of up to 20 or so men, usually friends and relatives of the one getting married, go away for the weekend to celebrate the groom’s last days of bachelor life. Such weekends often get so beer-soaked that in Prague, another popular cheap booze destination, the British embassy plans to issue 20,000 beer-mats warning that under Czech law you could spend a couple of days in jail for being drunk and disorderly. But there seems little doubt that Krakowites are having their patience tested by brash, boozy Brits. 

Legend has it the Swedes can give the Brits a run for their beer money. When they travel many Swedes make use of their country’s charter travel industry. It’s one of the few ways to swap the rain and snow for a bit of sun. Add to that Sweden’s restrictive laws on alcohol and you’re left with the motivation for many Swedes to see holidays as opportunities for liquor-fuelled fun in the sun. 

Russia, like all nations, is famous for certain things: great literature, epic battles, ballet and drinking. The late former President Boris Yeltsin did much to make sure we remember the drinking part. And as if Mr Yeltsin’s incapacitations weren’t warning enough, there’s new evidence that the dark side of the booze habit is crippling Russia's population. Alcohol abuse, particularly among men, is having a disastrous effect on the nation’s health. A recent study revealed that just under 50 percent of men in a typical provincial town in Russia die as a result of smoking and heavy alcohol consumption. RNW’s sober Moscow correspondent Geert Groot Koerkamp reports for Network Europe. 

The Swedish temperance movement has been increasingly concerned, with Western liquor companies and their clever PR advertisements, aiming at new markets in developing countries -- the growing middle class and especially women. In Sweden a new campaign called "Freedom Spirits" aims at reaching both Swedes and consumers abroad, about the dangers of alcohol consumption. ragic observations in many developing countries have noted those armies of poverty-stricken men in the sprawling city slums and in the countryside - spending all of their meagre wages on the local alcoholic brew - instead of on food for the family, badly-needed medicine or school books. But a more recent spotlight has focused on those Western-influenced ad campaigns on highway billboards and in magazines in Africa, Asia and Latin America - designed to capture new consumers with luxury scenes of the rising middle class enjoying expensive, imported spirits -- ads often for the first time including women. As a counter measure, the Swedish temperance movement has been using sophisticated-looking leaflets, brochures and even exhibitions offering free drinks from glamorous bottles of a brand called "Freedom Spirits" - containing no alcohol at all. 

People will certainly be shouting "skål" as they wine and dine in royal company during the Nobel ceremony in December in Stockholm but in the Czech Republic doctors are sounding the alarm. Women there are raising their glasses with a "Na zdravi!" far too often. In fact, in 2005, the number of women who entered Czech clinics with an alcohol abuse problem was twice as high one decade earlier. Radio Prague's Daniela Lazarova reports.