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A history of the country’s struggle with alcoholism, and why the government has done so little about it.
Picture the Russian alcoholic: nose rosy, face unshaven, a bottle of vodka firmly grasped in his hands. By his side he has a half-empty jar of pickles and a loaf of rye bread to help the devilish substance go down. The man is singing happily from alcohol-induced jubilation. His world may not be perfect, but the inebriation makes it seem that way.
Today, according to the World Health Organization, one in five men in the Russia Federation die due to alcohol-related causes, compared with 6.2 percent of all men globally. In 2000, in her article “First Steps: AA and Alcoholism in Russia,” Patricia Critchlow estimated that some 20 million Russians are alcoholics in a nation of just 144 million.

“After each drastically stepped-up anti-alcohol campaign, [Russian] society found itself faced with an even greater spread of drunkenness and alcoholism."

 The Russian alcoholic was an enduring fixture during the Tsarist times, during the times of the Russian Revolution, the times of the Soviet Union, during the transition from socialist autocracy to capitalist democracy, and he continues to exist in Russian society today. He sits on broken park benches or train station steps with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth, thinking about where his next drink will come from and whether he can afford it.
The Russian government has repeatedly tried to combat the problem, but to little avail: this includes four reforms prior to 1917, and larger scale measures taken during the Soviet period in 1958, 1972, and 1985. “After each drastically stepped-up anti-alcohol campaign, [Russian] society found itself faced with an even greater spread of drunkenness and alcoholism,” explains G.G. Zaigraev, professor of Sociological Sciences and Head Science Associate of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Kremlin’s own addiction to liquor revenues has overturned many efforts to wean Russians from the snifter: Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns to help pad the emperor’s purse. Before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s, Soviet leaders welcomed alcohol sales as a source of state revenue and did not view heavy drinking as a significant social problem. In 2010, Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, explained that the best thing Russians can do to help, “the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.”
By facilitating alcohol sales and distribution, the Kremlin has historically had considerable sway in recent decades. But Russia’s history with alcohol goes back centuries.
In the year 988, Prince Vladimir decided to convert his nation to Orthodox Christianity, partly because it allowed the consumption of alcohol. According to legend, monks at the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin were the first to lay their lips on vodka in the late 15th century, but as Russian writer, Victor Erofeyev notes, “Almost everything about this story seems overly symbolic: the involvement of men of God, the name of the monastery, which no longer exists (chudov means “miraculous”), and its setting in the Russian capital.” In 1223, when the Russian army suffered a devastating defeat against the invading Mongols and Tartars, it was partly because they had gone into battle drunk.
Ivan the Terrible established kabaks (establishments where spirits were produced and sold) in the 1540s, and in the 1640s they had become monopolies. In 1648, tavern revolts broke out across the country, by which time a third of the male population was in debt to the taverns. In the 1700s, to regain order, Peter the Great monopolized the vodka industry and used his subjects’ alcoholism for personal gain. As Heidi Brown, who spent 10 years covering Russia for Forbes magazine, explained, “[Peter the Great] decreed that the wives of peasants should be whipped if they dared attempt to drag their imbibing husbands out of taverns before the men were ready to leave.”
 Peter the Great also found a steady supply of free labor by allowing those who had drunk themselves into debt to stay out of debtors prison by serving 25 years in the army.
Widespread and excessive alcohol consumption was not only tolerated, but encouraged as a way of generating revenue. By the 1850s, nearly half the tsarist government’s tax revenues came from vodka sales. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin banned vodka. After his death, however, Stalin used vodka sales to help pay for the socialist industrialization of the Soviet Union. By the 1970s, receipts from alcohol again constituted a third of government revenues. One study found that alcohol consumption more than doubled between 1955 and 1979, to 15.2 liters per person.
It has been argued that heavy consumption of alcohol was also used as a means of reducing political dissent and as a form of political suppression. Russian historian and dissident Zhores Medvedev argued in 1996, “This ‘opium for the masses’ [vodka] perhaps explains how Russian state property could be redistributed and state enterprises transferred into private ownership so rapidly without invoking any serious social unrest.” Vodka, always a moneymaker in Russia, may have been a regime-maker as well.
To date, there have been only two expansive anti-alcohol campaigns in Russia, both of which took place during the Soviet Union: one under Vladimir Lenin and the other under Mikhail Gorbachev. All other leaders have either brushed alcoholism under the carpet or acknowledged heavy alcohol consumption but did nothing substantial about it. As Critchlow wrote, “Under the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev regimes, harsh penalties were imposed on those who committed crimes while intoxicated, but heavy drinking was not viewed as a threat to society, perhaps because the leaders, who themselves liked to indulge, saw the use of alcohol as a safety valve for low morale.”
In May 1985, Gorbachev announced legislation and a large-scale media campaign as part of the Kremlin’s new war on alcoholism—then the U.S.S.R.’s number one social problem and the third most common ailment after heart disease and cancer. It was largely seen as the most determined and effective plan to date: the birthrate rose, life expectancy increased, wives started seeing their husbands more, and work productivity improved. However, after a spike in alcohol prices and a decrease in state alcohol production, some started hoarding sugar to make moonshine, and others poisoned themselves with dangerous intoxicants such as antifreeze. The people’s displeasure with Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign can be summarized by an old Soviet joke: “There was this long line for vodka, and one poor guy couldn’t stand it any longer: ‘I’m going to the Kremlin, to kill Gorbachev,’ he said. An hour later, he came back. The line was still there, and everyone asked him, ‘Did you kill him?’ ‘Kill him?!’ he responded. ‘The line for that’s even longer than this one!’”
 Despite Gorbachev’s efforts, by the end of the Soviet era, alcoholism still had a stronghold in Russia. Its success ultimately lead to its failure: spending on alcohol from state outlets fell by billions of rubles between 1985 and 1987. Authorities expected that the loss in revenue would be more than offset by a predicted 10 percent rise in overall productivity, but such predictions were ultimately not met.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the state’s monopoly over alcohol was repealed in 1992, which lead to an exponential increase in alcohol supply. In 1993, alcohol consumption had reached 14.5 liters of pure alcohol per person, making Russia one of the largest consumers of alcohol in the world. To date, taxation on alcohol remains low, with the cheapest bottles of vodka costing just 30 rubles ($1) each. As Tom Parfitt explained in the Lancet in 2006, “There is a simple answer to why so many Russians fall prey to alcohol…it’s cheap. Between 30-60% of alcohol is clandestinely made, and therefore untaxed. A large quantity is run off on ‘night shifts’ at licensed factories where state inspectors are bribed to remove tags on production lines at the end of the working day.”
Vladimir Putin has criticized excessive drinking, and Dmitri Medvedev has called Russia’s alcoholism a “natural disaster,” but besides the rhetoric, little has been done to tighten regulations on the manufacture of liquor, and no coherent programs have been implemented to combat alcoholism. Gennady Onishchenko, Chief Public Health Inspector of the Russian Federation, has urged major spending on the treatment of alcoholism as a response to the tripling of alcohol-related mortality since 1990, arguing that prohibition and excise tax hikes are counterproductive.
Today, the dominant mode of treatment for alcoholism in Russia is a suggestion-based method developed by narcology (the subspecialty of Russian psychiatry that deals with addiction). Narcology, otherwise referred to as ‘coding’, is a procedure intended to provoke a subconscious aversion to alcohol.
The Russian Orthodox Church has met self-help programs with suspicion as well. Critchlow explained, “Despite their record of success with many alcoholics and drug addicts, the self-help programs Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous . . . have [been] met with resistance in Russia, especially from the medical profession, government officials, and the Russian Orthodox Church clergy.” She further wrote, “Members of the Russian Orthodox clergy have expressed distrust of the self-help movement, often because of the perception of it as a religious cult invading the country.”
In 2010, the Church described AA as an "effective instrument in rehabilitating drug and alcohol addicts,” while saying it would develop its own alcohol program.

As a young doctor, I helped perform a Santeria ritual for a patient in jail, rather than sending him to psychiatrists. I think I did the right thing.
The entrance to Ward D, in the bowels of Jackson Memorial Hospital, was through a thick steel door with a chest-high peephole. A cop sat on the other side. The room was a bare concrete rectangle with steel manacles embedded in the walls and a piss trough at the far end. I figured the D stood for dungeon. In front of each set of wall irons there was a gurney, usually with an inmate from Miami’s Dade County Jail sitting or lying on it.
Many years ago, I was doing my residency at Jackson Memorial, the major teaching hospital for the University of Miami School of Medicine, and part of our emergency room training was caring for sick prisoners. Inmates from the jail, one of the largest and most overcrowded in the country, were transported to Ward D for their medical care.
I remember a young man who’d been stabbed in the eye, a toothbrush quivering in his socket while his hands were shackled over his head to the wall behind him. There was a famous musician, high on a multi-drug cocktail, who had scraped his nimble guitar fingers raw trying to claw his way up his cell wall. And usually, there were a number of heroin addicts having seizures from going cold turkey. The word was that nine or 10 inmates had died in the Dade County Jail the year before, from overdoses, suicides, or murder.
Several of my fellow residents and I tried to improve conditions for the prisoners. We began staffing regular clinics in the jail, and at the minimum security Dade County Stockade, and we were able to substantially cut down on transfers to Ward D.
One late afternoon, as I was leaving the jail clinic, one of the guards asked me if I would mind checking on an inmate he was concerned about. He said he looked like he was in a trance, that he hadn’t moved or batted an eye since they brought him in the night before.
We walked up to the fifth floor, accompanied by a surround sound cursing cacophony. “Hey Doc, look at this!” “Fuck you!” Screams. Urine thrown.
The young man was alone in his cell, sitting in a lotus position, staring straight ahead. He was slender and wore an overlarge white jumpsuit. He was handsome and Hispanic, with dark brown curly hair. His name, the guard said, was Jose, and he’d been brought in the night before on a burglary charge. The guard had no more information.
Jose was motionless, catatonic. I suspected he was schizophrenic—although seeing him sitting like a baby-faced Buddha on the cell floor, it was difficult to imagine him stealing anything the night before. He did not respond to any of my questions. I picked up his hand and felt his pulse, holding his wrist, and he kept it there, chest high, when I let go. He had very long fingernails on his thumb and pinkie. Probably not a guitar picker, but handy cocaine spoons, I thought.
The guard called downstairs for more help and a gurney. We picked Jose up and rolled him to the small jail clinic.
Ron, a physician assistant, was there starting duty for the night shift. He was tall, fit, and smiling, with short blonde hair in a flat top and a clean-cut, confident presence. This was the first time we’d met. Ron watched as I examined Jose. He had evident needle track marks on his hands and forearms, and he kept his arms in the same positions I put them in while examining, like a doll, unmoving. His heart and lungs were fine and his pupils responded normally, contracting to my penlight, but I didn’t even try to have him lie down—he was stuck in his rigid, cross-legged posture.
Ron nodded his head at me, and we walked into our small office. Ron told me he thought that someone had put a mojo on Jose—that he was hexed, and that his fingernails were a clue. “Santeria,” he said.
I’d just learned about Santeria the week before—an Afro-Caribbean belief system that spread from the Yoruba culture of West Africa to Cuba and the Americas. Joan Halifax, a PhD. student in anthropology, had given a fascinating talk to our residents about hexing, spells, mojos, and witchcraft among the mix of Cubans, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, and Bahamians living in South Florida.
I suggested to Ron that we might be seeing hysteria, a conversion reaction in which overwhelming mental stress can cause paralysis. But in any event, we ought to have him evaluated by the hospital psychiatrists, in Ward D.
I called Joan Halifax, introduced myself, and told her about Jose. She said she’d come right over, and I arranged with the warden to allow her to come up to the clinic.
An hour or so later, Ron explained to Joan and me that he had been a medic before physician assistant school, and that after Vietnam, he’d spent considerable time in the “islands” at an unnamed military installation. There he’d become interested in Santeria and had befriended an Obispo, a bishop in this complex religion that blended elements of Catholicism with Yoruba gods and goddesses. The Obispo had taught Ron how to do exorcisms, and Ron said Jose needed one.
I could have said no. I could have just sent him to Ward D. But then Joan and I wouldn’t have this story to tell.
Ron placed a large brown grocery bag on the floor, from which he produced a beautiful king conch shell. We all walked into the exam room, and standing in front of Jose’s staring face, Ron lifted the conch shell above his head and smashed it into a hundred pieces on the floor. Then he picked up a sharp piece of shell, gripped Jose’s left wrist, and cut an X into his forearm, blood oozing out from the pattern. Then, with another piece of shell, he cut a matching X into his own left forearm. Jose did not flinch. Facing Jose, Ron bound their cut arms together, palm-to-palm, with a red bandana. They spent the night in the clinic like that, tied together.
I called the clinic in the morning and Ron told me that Jose was talking, He said that he’d performed some other Santeria rituals that night, and that Jose finally blinked a couple of times and asked where he was. He wasn’t hearing voices, and didn’t seem paranoid, but was pretty scared, reasonably normal behavior under the circumstances. As a physician, I’m still not sure why Jose woke up, but it could have something to do with grooming—that special behavior that we humans share with many animals—the ability to soothe each other, by touch, or talk, or tradition.
We all met late that afternoon at the jail, and Ron related Jose’s history. Jose was in his early 20s. His family had come to Florida from Cuba shortly after the 1959 revolution, while they still could. They moved to New York City to be closer to relatives, but as a teenager, Jose started using heroin, and his mother moved the family back to Miami to try to escape the drugs. It didn’t work. His mother finally kicked him out of the house, and she told him that she’d consulted the Obispo about him, and that he could return if he got clean. Jose told Ron that he’d only come back to his family’s house because he was looking for a place to hide after he’d robbed a convenience store. But when he arrived, he found a king conch shell by the front door and cops waiting in the bushes. Ron said, the king conch shell represented Elegua, the Santeria god and guardian of the crossroads of life, the spirit that controls entrances, exits and decisions, and that Elegua had put a spell on Jose, or at least Jose thought he had.

The judiciary may appear the only functional branch of the federal government, but it's contributing in a big way to a major national problem.
By a strange coincidence, the Supreme Court's October Term may begin just as the rest of the government collapses.
The Court, however, will assemble with a swagger. Though the 5-4 cases — like United States v. Windsor (the DOMA case) and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (the health-care case) garner the headlines — the Roberts Court is more harmonious than the rest of the government. Nearly half of its opinions last term were unanimous, the culmination of an upward trend from the last years of the Rehnquist Court. The justices may exchange sharp words in their opinions (and sarcastic looks on the bench), but they are great pals after hours, attending the opera or shooting large game animals in bipartisan packs. The Court is the branch that works.
So the justices will probably be feeling good as they put on their robes. But maybe they shouldn’t be high-fiving behind the velvet curtain. In fact, they might want to look in the mirror and wonder what part they have played in the train wreck that is 21st-century American democracy. It’s not a small one.
These reflections were spurred by a report in The New York Times that outside groups like the Club for Growth are using their massive wealth to threaten Republican members of Congress who dare hint at a compromise to avert shutdown and default. A number of House members know that the boat is about to go over the falls, but if they try to stop it, far-right individuals and groups will turn on them.
These members must avoid a primary challenge at any cost. But they don’t need to worry about voter backlash, even if they wreck the economy and the nation’s credit. That’s because scientific gerrymandering of House districts has made them all but immune to defeat by a Democratic opponent. In the 2012 election nationwide, Democratic candidates won a plurality of the vote, 48.8 percent to 48.47. But clever districting produced a Republican majority of 234-201 — nearly 54 percent of the seats. In many districts, voters have no real choice.
Red-state Republican senators who fear popular disgust — from, say, Latinos reacting to their resistance to immigration reform — have another line of defense: 18 states have passed vote-suppression measures since 2011. In close elections, just keeping one or two percent of the voters at home can make all the difference. In other words, American democracy is breaking down. It’s war to the knife between the parties.
In this spectacle of decay, the Court’s hands aren’t clean. Over the past two decades, a series of silly and impractical decisions, taken together, have helped clog the arteries of our political system. If that system suffers a catastrophic infarction next month, the Court must shoulder part of the blame.

Take polarization. Here is what may be the worst prophecy ever to appear in the United States Reports: "As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's time." Those words appeared in Justice John Paul Stevens’s opinion for the Court in the 1997 case of Clinton v. Jones, in which President Bill Clinton asked the Court to stay a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones. He did not ask for dismissal, just a delay until after he left office, arguing that having to respond to civil actions would distract him from his duties. Pish-tush, replied the justices. The result was the first impeachment and trial of a sitting president in more than a century. No single event has done more to foul the atmosphere of today’s politics.
Two years later, the five-justice conservative majority awarded the White House to George W. Bush, who systematically deepened political division in his years as president. "Get over it!" Justice Antonin Scalia likes to say when citizens question Bush v. Gore. Why should they? The nation hasn’t gotten over Bush; we’re not even close.
The gerrymander of 2010 flowed directly from a 2004 case where the Court considered Pennsylvania's carefully orchestrated, computer-driven redistricting — a partisan coup openly designed to maximize Republican gains. The same five who picked Bush threw the redistricting plaintiffs out of court. Scalia wrote for four of the five, "'Fairness' does not seem to us a judicially manageable standard."
As for the Court's role in dark money, I don’t need to say much. Since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2009, the Court has been at war with any effort to limit the political influence of the rich.
Finally, the ballot wars across the country owe much to the Court’s crabbed concept of democracy. In the 2008 case of Crawford v. Marion Co. Election Board, the Court told Indiana to go full-speed-ahead in a partisan voter-ID law aimed at imaginary fraud. "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history," Stevens breezily wrote. But he upheld the law because some fraud had occurred in New York City — in 1868.
Then, in June, the five conservative justices decided that Southern racism is a thing of the past, and that Southern states must be allowed to impose new ballot regulations without the pre-clearance mandated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law had been reauthorized with near unanimity by a huge bipartisan majority and signed by George W. Bush. But the majority disagreed: "Our country has changed." As a result, Southern states are erecting powerful new obstacles between minority voters and the ballot.
So when we lament polarization, the declining respect for democracy, the bitterness of the national dialogue, the dominance of money in politics, and the life-and-death struggle over the right to vote, we are lamenting trends either born in or enabled by the Supreme Court.
The Court isn't the cause of our current crisis. But the justices are not immune from the zombie epidemic; indeed, the Court may actually be a carrier of the plague.

American universities award more than 60,000 doctoral degrees every year. However, there are not enough academic jobs for all those graduates. One study asserts that only 41 percent of Ph.D.s will find tenure-track positions. Some studies are slightly more optimistic.  In a report for the academic journal PS, Jennifer Seagal Diascro reported that 49 percent of the 816 Ph.D.s who graduated from political science programs between 2009 and 2010 found permanent academic positions.  As universities increase the number of adjunct and non-tenure track lines at the expense of tenure positions, the number of Ph.D.s without permanent positions is unlikely to change.
So, what happens to the 60-ish percent of Ph.D.s who can’t find a tenure track-position? Until recently, the answer to this question had been elusive. But for a ground-breaking study described this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, sociologist Dean Savage created a database of 471 Ph.D. graduates from the sociology program at CUNY Graduate Center dating back to 1971. Using LinkedIn and Google searches, he mapped out the career outcomes of these students.
Savage found that less than half of the students who completed their sociology Ph.D. at CUNY Grad Center found full-time, tenure-track positions. Just over 30 percent of the students who graduated between 2000 and 2004 found tenure positions. Things look better for more recent grads: 44 percent of the 2005-2009 graduates were now employed as tenure or tenure-track faculty.
And what about the rest of the graduates, the ones who didn’t make the tenure track? Savage found that 80 percent of recent graduates had stable, full-time positions, even if they were not working as professors. He said that many graduates later found work as administrators within the CUNY system. Some found jobs in research fields, thanks to the quantitative skills gained in graduate school. Others were writers, librarians, and social workers. One is now a Buddhist monk.
Of the 471 Ph.D.s that Savage tracked, though, only two were employed as teachers in private or public schools. It’s surprising that so few scholars are transitioning to K-12 education when unable to find work within academia. Nation-wide, fewer than one percent of all public elementary and secondary school teachers have Ph.Ds.
Why isn’t public-school teaching a viable Plan B for Ph.D.s?
Marjorie Gursky received her Ph.D. from New York University in Ancient History in 2001. Due to geographic limitations and family demands, she was unable to participate in a nation-wide search for a tenure position. She considered teaching social studies at a public school and called the New York State Board of Education to inquire about teaching certification. She was told that she needed to complete additional coursework and work as a student teacher, which would amount to a two-year commitment.
Gursky said, “I thought I had enough school. If I could have done a one-year program, I would have done it, but two years was too long. I already spent ten years in school. It was also going to cost a lot of money.”
Gursky now teaches Hebrew school, does telemarketing, and edits college essays.

Time is running out to put the brakes on the planet's warming, says arguably the most exhaustively researched scientific paper in history.
The polar icecaps are melting faster than we thought they would; seas are rising faster than we thought they would; extreme weather events are increasing. Have a nice day! That’s a less than scientifically rigorous summary of the findings of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this morning in Stockholm.