[PEN-L:288] Russia: Peppered Vodka - New(?) Cure

[Gregory Schwartz <grishas@xxxxxxxx>]

First they (the Western pharmaceutical companies) poison people
world-wide with their drugs, producing acute dependence, obliterating
generations of accumulated knowledge concerning natural medicines, all
under the rubric of promoting 'advanced' health care (as though
headaches or colds required surgery), not to mention that despicable
appeal to our empathy through (insulting) cultural platitudes in the
form of "World Children's Fund", etc.. Then, when you've run out of
money, all of a sudden it's 'the bottom line'; no more talk of the
benevolence and the virtuous metropolitanism of 'Western civilization'.

Thankfully for the Russian workers, they have not been under the 'aegis'
of the West for too long and have retained some traditional medicinal
practices.

Cheers,
Greg

******
Peppered Vodka -- One Way to Replace Vanishing Western Drugs

MOSCOW -- (Agence France Presse) Russians will soon be forced to return
to the home cures of their grandmothers to replace the foreign drugs
which have become well nigh impossible to find since the devaluation of
the ruble in mid-August.

"Do you still have Upsa aspirin?. ... And no Coldrex either?" The
pharmacies of Moscow have been under siege since the first weeks of the
crisis and stocks have run out.

Sales have increased by up to 500 percent, such as in Nizhny Novgorod on
the banks of the Volga, the daily newspaper Kommersant reported.

Analgesics, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral medicines were the first to
go.

"If you have caught a cold, put mustard powder in woolen socks at night
and it will go away," a Muscovite woman advised another as they stood in
front of a shop window displaying only a few bottles of Russian and
foreign medicines.

"Even better, drink a glass of vodka with pepper and honey, like people
used to do. Personally, I drink it hot and say goodbye to a cold," a
pensioner advised.

The media has also produced time-honored recipes for grandmothers'
herbal teas which can help cure illness.

Diabetics have exhausted the stocks of insulin in the Altai region in
western Siberia, and the pharmacists of Volgograd are already sounding
the alarm bells: their stocks will run out in a week.

Many hospitals that are short of drugs, including the prestigious
Central Kremlin Hospital in Moscow, are asking their patients to bring
their own remedies with them.

The hospital in Stavropol in the northern Caucasus announced the
suspension of all surgery because of a shortage of drugs, the Izvestiya
daily newspaper revealed last week. The central hospital of the Kurgan
region in Siberia only has 15 percent of the drugs it requested.

"The patients of regional hospitals have flooded us with complaints of
this kind," said Health Ministry spokesman Vladimir Vyunitsky.

"We cannot do anything about it because it is the regional authorities
who distribute the grants which we send out. The hospitals are not
obliged to inform us of their reserves. Sometimes they resell them on
the black market," he added.

Russians, especially the seriously ill, had grown used to an abundance
of Western drugs, previously reserved to the Communist elite, and can no
longer imagine life without them.

But the collapse of the ruble, which has dropped in value by about 60
percent since August, has ruined half of the estimated 3,500
distributing companies, with the rest forced to suspend their purchases
abroad.

The 20 main Russian distributors have survived, but have increased the
prices of foreign drugs by as much as 200 percent and Russian products
by up to 100 percent.

Experts are already predicting that the foreign drug market -- more than
70 percent of the total market -- will be reduced five or six times as a
result of the financial crisis, said Vyunitsky.

As for the small number of home-produced products, they are often made
with imported raw materials and they are also likely to become more
scarce, according to the weekly Diengui (Money) magazine.

"It takes three or four months to launch the production line of a new
drug. The pharmacies will be totally empty well before that. And you
need credits to buy raw materials and machinery. But Russian banks are
paralyzed and Western banks refuse to give credits to Russian debtors,"
said Mikhail Groshenkov, the director of Russian pharmaceutical company
Farmatsentr.

To limit buying, the Ministry of Health is already preparing to stop 16
million low-income Russians from obtaining the reduced prices which they
enjoy for pharmaceutical products.

These people -- including pensioners, the disabled and war veterans --
have until now made up the 20 million people, or 14 percent of the
population, who consumed between 70 and 80 percent of the drugs sold in
Russia, according to Kommersant. ( (c) 1998 Agence France Presse)

--
Gregory Schwartz
Department of Political Science
York University
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, Ontario
M3J 1P3
Canada

Tel: (416) 736-5265
Fax: (416) 736-5686
Web: http://www.yorku.ca/dept/polisci