In 1997 Professor John Strang and Professor Michael Gossop of King’s College, London, published a paper on the modern history of heroin addiction. Their research suggested that even though heroin addiction was rampant in Asia (especially China) in the early 20th century, it only became widespread in South Asian countries (such as Pakistan) in the 1980s. Various Pakistani commentators over the years have claimed that in Pakistan heroin addiction not only shot up due to the sudden influx of the drug from Afghanistan during the 1980s’ civil war there, but also because of the alcohol prohibition imposed in Pakistan in April 1977. The prohibition was ordered by the Z.A. Bhutto regime which at the time was under pressure from a violent protest movement by an alliance of right-wing opposition parties.
Interestingly, a 2015 paper by researchers associated with the University of Sydney in Australia (Basma Al-Ansari, Anne Marie Thow, Caroline A. Day, and K.M. Conigrave), pointed out that consumption of alcoholic beverages in Muslim countries where a prohibition was in place actually grew after a proscription on alcohol came into effect.
The aforementioned paper, ‘Extent of Alcohol Prohibition in Civil Policy in Muslim-Majority Countries’ points out that the consumption of alcoholic beverages in Muslim-majority countries (where there is prohibition) has considerably gone up in the last many years. The paper states that historically these countries had low alcohol consumption rates when there was no prohibition, but that these rates have increased due to factors such as an increase in social stress triggered by political and economic instability.
In their research on alcohol consumption in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, Waseem Haider and M. Aslam Chaudhry (Biomadica Vol:24, July 2008) discovered that despite the 1977 prohibition on alcohol and further strengthening of this prohibition in 1979, alcohol consumption remained prevalent (in the Punjab). Their study also indicates that a majority of consumers comprised daily-wage labourers. They add that instead of addressing issues such as alcoholism, the prohibition has further complicated the matter.
Alcohol laws need to reviewed and replaced with a more pragmatic approach
Even though a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages (for Muslims) was placed in 1977, in 1979 the ban was given a more official tinge. Whipping and jailing were ordered for consumers but provisions were made for non-Muslim Pakistanis who could acquire alcoholic beverages from ‘licensed wine shops’ present in Sindh and Balochistan, but not in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).
Recently, due to a petition which pleaded the courts to shut down these shops, the courts ordered that the shops be moved to ‘minority areas.’ However, it must also be pointed out that these shops have for long kept in check bootlegging mafias in Sindh and Balochistan. Indeed, bootleggers are ever-present in these two provinces as well, but the number of cases of deaths and injury caused by tainted ‘moonshine’ whisky is higher in Punjab where there are no ‘wine shops.’
The Sindh government earns revenues of over four billion rupees annually from these shops which are also important employment avenues for Sindh’s non-Muslims. The last reported case of a person being whipped for consuming alcohol was in 1981. As studies by Basma, Thow and Conigrave and even Haider and Aslam show, consumption actually increased after the prohibition came into effect. In fact, it may now actually be higher compared to the consumption rates in some Muslim countries where there is no prohibition on alcohol.
So, basically, one can conclude that in Pakistan, the rate of alcohol consumption was lower when there was no prohibition. This was further endorsed by the University of Sydney findings that the same is the case in almost all Muslim countries where there is a prohibition. What’s more, Haider and Aslam point out that alcoholism becomes a more complicated issue in countries with prohibition because those suffering from alcoholism do not come forward for treatment out of fear of the laws. A letter in Dawn (published, November 28, 2016) questioned the logic of the prohibition by suggesting that alcohol consumption was hardly ever reported to have been involved in causing any major heinous crime in the country.