How drink is killing Finns
Finns have never been free from the vice of drinking, but the latest news we’ve heard about such matters sounds quite horrifying. Compared with how things were 20 years ago, twice as many women are dying too early due to alcohol-related diseases. But women are nowhere near men’s poor statistical values.
Basically, the problem with alcoholism is getting entirely out of hand in Finland, so much that the economy is in jeopardy because of the damage inflicted by the drinking problem on the gross national product.
This conclusion has been made by a team of researchers from the University of Eastern Finland, who are of the opinion that Finland is now most similar to Russia as far as alcoholism is considered. We cannot compare ourselves to Sweden anymore, although the same culture is quite prevalent there. The epidemic of drinking-related diseases is worse in certain parts of the biggest cities in Finland than even in St. Petersburg, the nearest big city in Russia.
When did drinking get out of control like this? When I was a teenager Finns were drinking a lot, but at the same time everybody knew that we weren’t consuming half as much alcohol as southern Europeans were. True enough, we had trouble during public festival days, when drunkards were running wild in the streets or causing trouble in their homes. But there wasn’t much drinking during workdays.
At the beginning of the nineties, though, it became common in the media to argue that the Finnish way of drinking was no good and that we should imitate the way Italians and the French drink their wine. The result was that Finns kept their old bad ways – the drinking bouts come the weekend – while adopting the Mediterranean style of everyday sipping.
Is it possible to do anything about this problem? Unfor-tunately, the answer seems to be no. The image of alcohol is far too good in Finland. There is much talk about the ‘wet generation’ (wet with booze) after the youth rebellion of the sixties. In Finland this rebellion greatly emphasised how important it was that young people be entitled to have as much alcohol and tobacco as they wanted. Nobody was paying any attention to the right of young people to spend their formative years without destroying their health with these poisons at the very beginning of their lives. People associated teetotalism with old-fashioned religious conservatism, while booze was sexy.
Many are even of the opinion that it is a kind of honour to disregard such restrains.
Panu Petteri Höglund is a translator and linguist who studied German, Polish, and Russian at Åbo Akademi University in Finland.
