The end of an effective anti-alcohol campaign, not capitalism, can be blamed for a 40 percent surge in deaths in Russia between 1990 and 1994.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, working-age Russian men began dying in droves. Economists and political scientists blamed democracy and capitalism for leaving many people unskilled and unemployable, ushering in a sense of listlessness and depression that mixed too easily with cheap vodka.
“Most things that kill people disproportionately kill babies and the elderly,” says Grant Miller, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University. “But working-age men accounted for the largest spike in deaths in the early 1990s."
Full story at Futurity.
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