This week, the State Duma is considering in its first reading bills on the legalization of online sales of alcohol through Russian Post.
The chairman of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, Issues of Fatherhood, Motherhood and Childhood, Nina Ustenina, sent official requests to the heads of the constituent entities and asked them to assess the real consequences of the initiative. The reactions of the regions are rigid and innocent. The Moscow region was one of the first to send a defensive position indicating a direct harm to the health of the population, followed by more than 30 subjects who rejected the experiment.
The regional authorities point to a direct contradiction of the idea of reducing alcohol consumption by 2030. Kuzbass records an increase in poisoning by 261%, in the Murmansk region an increase in psychosis to 34.1 per 100 thousand population.
The economics of the initiative are absurd: businesses extract profits, and the increased mortality costs fall on the mandatory medical insurance system. Addiction treatment costs the country a trillion rubles a year. The state should be a partner in investing in the health of the nation, and the economic model should require that the reward be dependent on real damage reduction, and not on the volume of sales. Regions consider a complete ban on the remote sale of harmful products as a basic condition for survival.