A bill tabled by LREM deputies planned to authorize the consumption of alcohol again in football stadiums. The Minister of Health strongly opposed it.
The return of refreshment bars selling alcoholic beverages in football stadiums will not be for a while.
Prohibited since the Evin law of 1991, the sale of alcohol in sports arenas was nevertheless the wish of certain deputies of the majority. On July 24, 105 of them tabled a bill requesting a further relaxation of the ban by modifying its article 18. Already, in 1999, a “bar debt” granted sports clubs ten exemptions per year, granted by the mayor or the prefect at the request of their association, to sell beer in stadiums.
The proposal tabled by LREM deputies wanted to put an end to what they consider to be a difference in treatment between professional clubs by granting them the right to sell alcoholic beverages themselves, without going through their sports association.
“What we are asking, this group of parliamentarians, is that we lead a reflection, that for a year people can actually sell beer as is done in rugby stadiums where there are hardly any problem”, thus explains to France Info Patrick Vignal, LREM deputy for Hérault.
Agnès Buzyn’s “no”
But the bill did not please Agnès Buzyn. In a tweet dated August 9, the Minister of Health strongly opposed it, recalling that “alcohol kills 41,000 people each year in our country” and that “each of these deaths is preventable”. “Let’s not let new incitements to the consumption of alcohol become complicit in this record. Fervor does not need alcohol to express itself in our stadiums.”
Alcohol kills 41,000 people each year in our country. Each of these deaths is preventable.
Let’s not let new incentives for alcohol consumption become complicit in this record.
Fervor does not need alcohol to express itself in our stadiums.
— Agnes Buzyn (@agnesbuzyn) August 9, 2019
LREM deputy and doctor Jean-Louis Touraine also warned that he would not vote for the bill. “Alcohol and sport are antithetical. In a stadium, you don’t drink.”
The addictologists wind up
A position shared by the French Federation of Addictology (FFA). In an open letter to the Minister of Health, she assures that “all the players in addictology represented by the FFA expect (…) that you firmly and publicly oppose these base maneuvers which have no sole objective to gradually empty the Évin law of all the provisions that hinder the alcohol lobby.
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