23.07.2011

Sweet Poison: On the Dangers of Canned Alcohol

How many tears, bitter words and despair vodka brings to many families. How much damnation is addressed to this drink! But for some reason very few are aware of the evil hidden in bright tin cans and bottles in which shops and kiosks abound. “Jaguar”, “Kasanova”, “Nirvana” and the queen of all – “Absolute Nirvana” (“Polnaya Nirvana”). The first differs from the second in volume: one has 0,33 liter, the other 0,5… “real English…” – so says advertising. But next to this bored beauty is no elegant gentleman, but a jar with gin. “Real” gin… Looks like he needs to help young women and girls manage their problems “beautifully”, like in TV series or in some glossies.

The unimaginable union of gin, whisky, vodka with fruity and fizzy additions, “identical natural” just as beer, is extremely popular among today’s youth.

Sales volume is terrifying: hundreds of million portions are not only produced, but also successfully drunk up by our countrymen. The producers are pleased – the market grows and that means their profit increases, too. And we have to understand, that the number of teens, who fill up the ranks of alcoholics, is and will growing.

Already some generation of our children are brought up in the oceans of “Cola” and “Pepsi”, “Sprite” with “Fanta”, “Kolokoltshika” and “Buratini”. To take the step from usual “liquid sugar candy” (as the fizzy drinks are called in the West) to sweet pops with addition of alcohol is easy as a pie for them.

Alcopops, in contrast to beer, are excised alcohol products and that’s why advertisement for them is forbidden on television. However it looks like if this fact has only little bearing on their diffusion.

Medicals are troubled: Because alsopops do not only lead to alcoholism like other poisons, but also “soil” the organism with preservatives, dyes and aromatizers. For certain no one can say, what actually is mixed in these flashy bottles.

The producers, of course, assure that the quality of their products is controlled thoroughly. “Only in the first cheap Polish gin-tonics was pure crude spirit. We now use only clear spirit of highest quality. Moreover chemic are replaced by natural aromatizers or even by real fruit juice”, they say. A further excuse – due to cocktails and beer the consumptions-rate of vodka has declined.

However experts in narcology assure that the phenomena “alcopopholism” already in full measure appears in our country.

One to five years pass to its formation. But the disease pattern and its consequences are much harder and destructive, than the consequences of normal alcoholism, inasmuch they may lead to serious deprivations of heart and lung of a healthy adult. So what to say about teenagers? The organism of a teenager gets accustomed even faster.

Because the faster a certain kind of alcohol produces a state of flush and euphoria, the more and often he will use it. A relatively small portion of alcohol in the drink does not ease the situation. Practically all cocktails contain aeration and carbonic gas noticeable hastens the approach of flush. This leads to the end that the person uses “jars” in increasing doses and doesn’t drink because of the taste, but because of the flush effect.

By the way, experts in narcology assure that not only teenagers but also housewives suffer from this “sweet alcoholism”. By daily shopping mum buys a bottle for her, in order to relax and excurse from the permanent and boring housework. It begins with one-two bottles and concludes in a whole package. The poison in the “funny” cover is consumed in large quantities and trough those women get addicted to more potent drinks. And the halter is more and more tighten – sweet and unnoticed. Because the victim thinks that the poison is harmless and refuses to call it self addict.

Schoolchildren even the morning on the way to school suck a gin-tonic or a skrudriver and think that this is really cool. That’s not banal boring “Klinskoe”. It’s like something from the life of James Bond!

In reality this preserved alcopops are as distant from their prototype, which is served in bars, than a cognac drink from a real cognac. While the second is a natural and lordly alcohol, a cognac drink is a blend of commonplace spirit, water, cheap aromatizers and dyestuff. When you add water to this mixture and sweeten is, you will get a typical alcopop. And here another receipt: Take cola or any other fuzzy drink and mix it with spirit. Thanks to this union with “liquid sugar candy” children easily get used to these alcopops.

These drinks do not only contain alcohol, but masses of chemical foodstuff – aromatizers, dyes, stabilizers, preservatives. And are they harmless?

Even if producers assure that they use “nature identical” aromatizers, is implied that their molecules are copies of natural aromatics, synthesizers of fruits, berries and other fruit-stuff. In reality everything is much more complicated. Vivid differ from dead aromatizers, which are synthesized in test-tubes. After a few years have passed by -you can be sure- publications about such chemicals will grow like a snowball.

And that dyes, stabilizers and preservative are able to evoke side-effects is known even today. In the view of specialists there is none harmless substance among the synthetic dyers. Their dosage is strictly limited, but their usage is widely spread – amongst others in alcopops.

The components of this unfortunate and rattling mixture – sugar, alcohol and gas – strengthen the absorption of each other. As a result the organism gets a double blow: the brain has to bear the alcohol and the pancreas suffers from the sugar (in one bottle are 5-6 bites of the “sweet dead’). For the organism this it too much – especially for a children’s one.

However our teenagers already found a way to make their mixture even more monstrous –together with their cocktails they wash down some tablets, which no doctor ever recommended them. But about this – next time.

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