Red Tape Hot Box The dangers of drinking and then falling down

Surprisingly, in a country where the level of alcohol consumption is one of the highest in Europe, the number of drunks on the streets of Warsaw is relatively low.

This state of affairs is due to the existence of Izba Wytrzeźwień. Izba Wytrzeźwień are places where drunks are detained until they sober up, upon which time they are forced to cough up some money for the privilege of staying there. Warsaw's own Izba Wytrzeźwień is on Kolska Street.

These places, which were built in the 1950s, exist in most towns around Poland and are still common across post-communist countries. On the one hand, they help to keep all the aggressive drunks away from society - thus preventing them from harming others as well as themselves - and for this reason a majority of people approve of them. However, there is also a dark side to these centers, of which many citizens are not aware.

They are often used by the police as detention centers, and as such, human rights are frequently broken, patients are humiliated, insulted and are sometimes physically abused. But the biggest problem is that these institutions do not have the proper equipment to check if detainees are injured, rather than just drunk. Unfortunately, such cases happen quite often because, if the police see somebody lying on the sidewalk at night, they simply assume that he/she is drunk. Thus, victims of assaults resulting in broken skulls or fractured spines and people suffering from strokes and heart attacks often land, not in hospitals, but in Izba Wytrzeźwień where, due to a lack of proper attention and ill-treatment they often die. Consequently, up to 40-50 people die every year.

The best way to minimize such costly mistakes would be to create out-patients' departments, like those in Germany or Scandinavia. Moreover, these places shouldn't be used by the police as temporary prisons, as this is against the European Convention on Human Rights. This will have to change after Poland enters the European Union, but, for now, anybody can become a client of Izba Wytrzeźwień - because a night-street patrol has almost unrestricted powers to decide if a person is drunk or not.