The Raki Wars
Parliament has introduced an amendment to the law on alcoholic beverage sales, prohibiting the outdoor sale of alcoholic beverages and requiring that the drink be consumed directly from the bottle. The alcohol is served to the table in a bottle and the customer opens its cap. What about people who just want to order one glass of, say, raki? The Zaman columnist Mumtaz’er Turkone suggests that producers will have to produce smaller-sized bottles. “Some producers have actually already done so. Currently, there are small packages equivalent to two glasses on the market.”
As opposed to those who see these restrictions as one more attempt by the ruling Islam-inflected AK Party to curtail alcohol use, Turkone interprets this prohibition as aiding public health because it makes it impossible to serve counterfeit alcohol which, because of the high taxes on alcohol, would be a lucrative trade. The higher board of alcoholic beverages has stated that the prohibition against outdoor sales covered markets selling alcoholic beverages, not restaurants.
From Mumtaz’er Turkone’s column:
The amendment so strongly criticized by Hürriyet has solid reasons based on health considerations. Let us first point to a basic difference between Turkey and Europe in terms of alcoholic consumption habits. The pub culture is not common in Turkey. Alcohol drinkers do not buy their drink in pubs where all beverages are offered. Instead, they take a seat in a restaurant where they are served the alcoholic beverage they prefer. This is our “meyhan” culture vis-à-vis Europe’s pub culture. At a restaurant, or meyhane, the customer is served the raki in a special glass unless he asks for a whole bottle. This poses a great risk for health and sanitation. Counterfeit alcohol production amplifies the magnitude of the danger; alcoholic beverages are subject to a high rate of taxation and for this reason, there is a great difference between the cost and sales price of these beverages. This makes counterfeit beverage production attractive. It is pretty easy to produce alcoholic beverages in illegal facilities. The producers of these fake drinks easily escape inspection and taxation; therefore, their products pose a great danger to public health. The rakis that include a high level of methyl alcohol in particular are very dangerous. The counterfeit drinks are offered for sale mainly at hotels and restaurants. These counterfeit beverages are served in “raki cups.”
The risk associated with counterfeit drinks is not a mere possibility. A number of people died from counterfeit raki and vodka a few years ago. Alcohol diffuses into the blood immediately. For this reason, it can cause sudden death. In response to these casualties in connection with counterfeit drinks, the public authorities introduced new arrangements requiring the production of bottles with anti-counterfeit sealing caps. These seals make the production of fake packing difficult. Now, non-bottled drinks pose the greatest risk and danger.
Ludicrous and pathetic apologetics masquerading as reasoned argument. The difference he purports to outline between a pub/bar and a meyhane is bogus since you do not see the bartender break special seals on bottles in the West either. Since the piece is in English, I wonder who he thinks he’s writing for. Perhaps Turkone is the wrong sycophant for this task. Maybe we’ll see some prose from Dagi attempting to convince us that raki-drinkers who buy by the glass are against the values of the West, or one from Akyol on civil liberties being violated when raki is served by the glass.
Moonshine is not counterfeit booze, by the way. Nor is it dangerous. AFAIK, one cannot produce methyl alcohol in a moonshine still. Governments poison cheap un-taxed athyl alcohol (‘denatured’ is the euphemism in the US) meant for industrial use and unscrupulous bootleggers use that instead of distilling their own.
As Turkone points out, people did die from poisonous booze when the AKP government first hiked the taxes a few years ago. Establishments that serve drinks wisened up and started watching what they buy after that. We do longer have that problem, so I wonder why he thinks this measure is necessary to fix it. Perhaps they’ll raise taxes again and this new measure is in preperation for that?
It isn’t just hard liquor that the gov’t is fighting against, BTW. Cabinet ministers have been complaining that legitimate wineries have been concealing their their production numbers from the gov’t to evade taxes. I don’t know how this new law will deal with that. Unlike the ones on raki, high taxes on wine hurt the tourism industry by making cheap table wine no-so-cheap.
If the AKP government wants to impose haevy sin taxes for budgetary or ‘moral’ reasons, it is their prerogative, of course. It is obvious that the more exorbitant the taxes, the more heavy-handed and intrusive the government needs to get to collect them. Clearly, taxing booze and interfering with people’s drinking doesn’t hurt them since their voter base generally don’t drink. It is also possible that interfering with the sale of alcohol gets them some votes. Such is politics.
I wonder what the gov’t response will be if a company branded their small bottles ‘Tayyip.’ This is not unprecented, the small raki bottle used to be called ‘Fahrettin Kerim’ after the teetotalling governor of Istanbul. Of course it was done informally back then. Since, now, as we are assured by Zaman columnists, our attitudes are being transformed by the free market, one would expect some entrepreneur to use this opportunity and trademark the name for use on small raki bottles. Why do I think nobody will dare do this? It’d be worth it just to see the AKP press squirm to justify the ensuing heavy-handed response against the company (that is if the trademark can be gotten at all).
How nice to run into you again Bulent (after Jim’s Istanbul Despatch)…
Actually these apologists are funny in that they unnecessarily embroil themselves in nonsense (very possibly so in this case in any event). This law is much broader than just about serving liquor by the glass. Jake D. Olson touched the same subject in his blog, and I took a look at the old and the new laws (4733 and 5752, respectively; links are available to both in my comments there). Jake points out some clarifications (though still poor) by the chairman of the Regulatory Board for tobacco and alcohol products. The changes are very probably about curtailing open-bottle alcohol sales at bufe-like establishments where liquor can otherwise be sold (in bottles, for people to take home and the like). I didn’t see anything in the law to suggest otherwise. Except of course the law’s broad scope forced me to skim through real fast… And again, there is these fools for AKP apologists who don’t make things easier for anybody.