Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Paweł, a poultry farmer who lives in the Polish village of Garbatka-Letnisko, had to fire three of his 10 employees last year because they kept arriving drunk to work.
“It’s hard to find good workers, and this job comes with a lot of responsibility when you’re caring for 40,000 chickens,” he said.
Paweł’s decision reflects a growing challenge in Poland’s labour market. An ageing population and historically low unemployment — just 2.6 per cent in January, the lowest in the EU alongside the Czech Republic — have made it difficult to find reliable farmhands. Alcohol abuse can make it difficult to retain them.
Paweł had little choice but to fire his employees. A few years ago, a worker on the night shift fell asleep and failed to monitor the ventilation system, killing two-thirds of his flock. “I don’t know if he got drunk during the night, or had been drinking the day before and just went to sleep here,” he said.
Poland is not Europe’s heaviest-drinking nation but it ranks second for alcohol-related deaths relative to its population after Slovenia, according to Eurostat.
The high death rate is attributed to Poland’s specific consumption patterns, as well as lack of preventive healthcare. Poland “has a relatively high prevalence of spirits and a significant prevalence of one-off heavy drinking, to get drunk as quickly as possible”, said Bogusława Bukowska, acting director of the National Centre for Combating Addictions, a government agency.
Local medical staff are left to deal with the consequences. The emergency unit at the hospital near Paweł’s farm treats around 10 severely intoxicated individuals each week, many of them repeat cases. “They are a huge burden for our hospital, because they can be very aggressive,” said director Ewa Gizicka. “I feel we should be caring for the truly ill, and not for alcoholics who disturb other patients.”
Nationwide, emergency hospital services recorded 26,000 visits due to alcohol abuse in 2023, up from 16,000 in 2013. The rise may be the result of the country’s market deregulation and higher purchasing power in the early 2000s, said Jan Śpiewak, a Warsaw-based sociologist. “Alcohol stayed cheap, compared to both inflation and salaries.”
Alcohol is one of the reasons for the “markedly shorter life expectancy” of Polish men compared to women, said Paweł Koczkodaj of the Maria Sklodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology. One of his studies found that 93 per cent of alcohol-related laryngeal cancer cases in Poland occurred in men.
The problem of inebriated Poles extends into politics — and not only as a policy issue.
In February, far-right MP Ryszard Wilk had to be escorted from parliament while intoxicated. A month later, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told deputy foreign minister Andrzej Szejna to take a leave of absence after he acknowledged undergoing treatment for alcohol abuse.
Yet the candidates in this year’s presidential election are united in opposing tighter rules on selling alcohol. In Warsaw, mayor and presidential frontrunner Rafał Trzaskowski successfully appealed a local court’s ruling that would have banned night-time drinking along the city’s Vistula riverbanks.
The industry is also putting up a fight. Andrzej Szumowski, former president of the Polish association of spirits producers, describes debates about where to sell alcohol as “just political fog”. Instead of regulation, he argues that the country needs better education. In three decades working in the industry, he said, “I don’t remember ever seeing a well-prepared campaign to educate people about how to drink responsibly.”
Tusk’s administration has taken some steps to tighten the ban on selling alcohol to children. But when health minister Izabela Leszczyna drafted a bill to ban online alcohol sales and prohibit night-time sales at petrol stations she faced resistance.
There is little political will to change Poland’s drinking culture. “I’m ashamed of politicians, including those on my side, who think banning alcohol at petrol stations is an attack on freedom,” Leszczyna told a conference in February. “It’s stupidity, not freedom.”