Lithuania: Last orders for Lithuanian teenagers as government cracks down on alcohol

Heavy-drinking Lithuania plans to introduce most prohibitive alcohol laws in Europe, but young people aren’t complaining

The Guardian

By Daniel Boffey in Vilnius

June 9, 2017

Opposite the Keulė Rūkė bar and BBQ joint near the main train station in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, a 6ft-high mural has appeared in recent weeks. It depicts three of Lithuania’s leading politicians as the Taliban, complete with suicide bombs and machine guns. Scrawled underneath the image are the words: “The party is over.”

Lithuania’a coalition government, led by the Peasant and Greens Union in cahoots with the Social Democrats, last week passed legislation banning alcohol advertising entirely from TV, radio or newspapers, cutting the hours at which alcohol can be sold in shops and – potentially most controversially – increasing the legal drinking age from 18 to 20.

Under the law, coming into force on 1 January 2018, it will not only be illegal for those under 20 to drink alcohol, but unless they work in bars, they will be banned from even touching it, making the law the most prohibitive in Europe.

Perhaps what is most surprising about the fuss that the new law has caused among young people, however, is that beyond the eye-catching display outside the Keulė Rūkė bar there really hasn’t been any.

Liberal MP Aušrinė Armonaitė says she has asked the Lithuanian president, Dalia Grybauskaitė, to veto the law and wants the youth to rise up. “This could be an opportunity for youth NGOs to press that button”, she says. “I hope they are going to do this. There have been some moves but I think it should be more public and more massive.”

It doesn’t appear as yet, however, that the youth are really up for it. Sitting in the Keulė Rūkė, drinking a beer and eating a burger, Simona Muckute, 25, explains she, for one, is sick of Lithuania’s dependency on alcohol. “We are broken as a nation”, she says. “Obviously I am too young to have lived through the Soviet times but my parents did and we are products of them.

“They are the ones who raised us and almost all of them drink heavily. The Lithuanian family is where the father drinks and drinks and leaves the mother to do her best alone”. Her friend, Else Sidorenkarté, 25, nods in agreement. Sitting nearby, Eimantas Uscila, 25, adds: “There are a lot of people here who have problems. I think it’s a good idea”.

According to the latest World Health Organisation data, Lithuanians are the world’s heaviest drinkers and the country’s addiction shows no signs of abating. In 2016, Lithuanians drank, on average, the equivalent of 18.2 litres of pure alcohol per person, up from 14.9 litres more than a decade ago. That is the same as 910 large beers (500ml) or medium glasses of wine (152ml) over the year, equating to two-and-a-half glasses a day.

“The alcohol problem is a very old issue in Lithuania”, says Aurelijus Veryga, Lithuania’s health minister, who is depicted on the Keulė Rūkė mural holding a Kalashnikov. “I remember the first national Lithuanian health programme accepted in 1998 [after independence] in the parliament. Then the target was to reduce alcohol consumption by 25%. Well, in fact, what happened since 1998, the whole policy was so liberalised, that we had an increase by 130%.”

Veryga doesn’t expect every teenager to applaud the government’s stance. “I do understand the young people”, he says. “They don’t like regulation – as a teenager you are against everything. Adults are the stupidest people on earth. That’s for all generations.”

But, he says, there is a quiet acceptance of the need to do something radical. People, he suggests, are now waking up the extent of the national problem.

“We came to the situation that society was quite regularly faced with shocking events”, Veryga says. “Children killed on the roads by drunk police driving cars. Children murdered by drunk parents. Society has reached the level where it became unsafe for all of us. It isn’t just about consumption by capita, which is generating all the discussion.”

A third of 15- and 16-year-olds said they have drunk in the last 30 days, according to government surveys, the minister says. The number of children being admitted to hospital in a state of intoxication has increased 17-fold since 2001.

“And then we have indicators on disease”, Veryga says. “On chronic noncommunicative diseases, such as heart disease and cancers, we are among the leaders. Sometimes we hear: ‘We don’t drink so much. This is the tourists. They come to Lithuaniaand they drink alcohol.’ If that would be true, it would be the tourists dying, not us. But we are dying. So we drink a lot.”

The liberals complain that the government is targeting the wrong people. It is the older generations who are drinking the most. “The law is the heaviest in the European Union”, says Armonaite, who at 28 is the youngest Liberal MP in the Lithuanian parliament.

“A person is an adult at the age of 18: you have rights, responsibilities, you can marry, drive. Our main argument is that we believe in young adults and their responsibility – and we are not alcoholics,” she says.

Veryga, in response, says that there needs to be a cultural shift. “Alcohol is killing young people,” he says. “People die on the roads, we have very high suicide rates. You don’t have to be an alcoholic for alcohol to kill you.

“The problem is that we have been shocked by things and then people have forgotten. I understand the liberals. It is survival of the fittest, the smartest. We have not dealt with this in a systematic way in the past. We are now.”