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. 2020 Nov 9;17(21):8270.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17218270.

Russia's National Concept to Reduce Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol-Dependence in the Population 2010-2020: Which Policy Targets Have Been Achieved?

Maria Neufeld  1   2   3 , Anna Bunova  4 , Boris Gornyi  4 , Carina Ferreira-Borges  2 , Anna Gerber  5 , Daria Khaltourina  6 , Elena Yurasova  7 , Jürgen Rehm  1   3   5   8   9   10   11
Affiliations

Russia's National Concept to Reduce Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol-Dependence in the Population 2010-2020: Which Policy Targets Have Been Achieved?

Maria Neufeld et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

In the 2000s, Russia was globally one of the top 5 countries with the highest levels of alcohol per capita consumption and prevailing risky patterns of drinking, i.e., high intake per occasion, high proportion of people drinking to intoxication, and high frequency of situations where alcohol is consumed and tolerated. In 2009, in response to these challenges, the Russian government formed the Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation and published a national strategy concept to reduce alcohol abuse and alcohol-dependence at the population level for the period 2010-2020. The objectives of the present contribution are to analyze the evidence base of the core components of the concept and to provide a comprehensive evaluation framework of measures implemented (process evaluation) and the achievement of the formulated targets (effect evaluation). Most of the concept's measures were found to be evidence-based and aligned with eight out of 10 areas of the World Health Organization (WHO) policy portfolio. Out of the 14 tasks, 7 were rated as achieved, and 7 as partly achieved. Ten years after the concept's adoption, alcohol consumption seems to have declined by about a third and alcohol is conceptualized as a broad risk factor for the population's health in Russia.

Keywords: Russia; alcohol affordability; alcohol mortality; alcohol policy; alcohol use disorders; health behaviors; life expectancy; lifestyle; noncommunicable diseases; prevention.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. Carina Ferreira-Borges and Elena Yurasova are staff members of the WHO, and Maria Neufeld is a WHO consultant. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this article and they do not necessarily represent the views, decisions or policies of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

Figures

Figure A1
Figure A1
Relative shares of alcoholic beverages in total sales, converted into pure liters of alcohol of each beverage type (for details, see methodological descriptions above). Sources: Federal State Statistics Serves, beginning in 2017, Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation as based on EGAIS * monitoring.
Figure A2
Figure A2
Regional time restrictions on hours of alcohol sales (off-premise). Source: Consultant.ru.
Figure A3
Figure A3
Incidence of alcoholic psychosis and harmful use of alcohol per 100,000 as registered within state-run narcology services. Source: Serbsky National Medical Research Centre for Psychiatry and Narcology of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.
Figure 1
Figure 1
Changes in excise rates on different alcoholic beverages in rubles per liter, adjusted for inflation by using the annual consumer price index. Right scale: beer, left scale: other alcoholic products. Separate excise rates for wine and sparkling wine apply. See Appendix A Table A4a,b for more details and an overview of non-adjusted excise rates. Sources: Tax Code of the Russian Federation and the Federal Statistical Service.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Minimum retail prices for different alcoholic beverages in rubles per liter. Source: Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Affordability of alcoholic beverages, defined as how much of a specific beverage could be afforded with a Russian per capita income in a given year, calculated for pure liters of alcohol of each beverage. For wine and fortified wine, no data was available for 2018. Sources: Federal State Statistics Service.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sales of alcoholic beverages in millions of deciliters. Left scale: vodka and spirits, wine and wine products, sparkling wines. Right scale: beer and beer-based products. Sources: Federal State Statistics Services, beginning in 2017, Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation as based on the EGAIS* monitoring.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Shares of recorded and unrecorded alcohol consumption among total consumption (15+). Adapted from: World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, 2019 [11], and Manthey et al., 2019 [77].
Figure 6
Figure 6
Age-standardized rate of harmful alcohol consumption per 100,000 population (aged 21 and older), defined as a score of ≥2 according to the CAGE screening tool (until 2018) and as ≥3 for women and ≥4 for men for AUDIT-C (starting from 2018). Left scale: men, right scale: women. Source: National Medical Research Center for Therapy and Preventive Medicine of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Age-standardized death rates per 100,000 for 100% alcohol-attributable causes of death. Source: Russian Fertility and Mortality Database. Adapted from: World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, 2019 [11].
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