GREECE:A CAMPAIGN has been launched in Greece by tourism officials against bars serving "bombes", cocktails of spirits that are being blamed for increasingly bad behaviour in holiday resorts.
The campaign, which will see police officers and scientists conducting random checks of nightclubs and bars, comes amid mounting evidence that unsuspecting holidaymakers are being sold drinks laced with lethal doses of industrial spirit.
Adulterated alcohol is believed to be behind the death of a British teenager who collapsed after a binge-drinking session outside a nightclub in the resort of Laganas on the island of Zakynthos last month.
"In certain areas, like Malia on Crete, bombes are a real problem," said Sophia Nova, a tourism ministry official. "We may talk a lot about the attitude of tourists and their excessive drinking but often it's the alcohol that's at fault."
Mixing alcohol with industrial spirit to make beverages go further is an old ruse among unscrupulous bar-owners in Greece. In recent years, however, the bombe appears to have grown in popularity with proprietors eager to attract customers with cheap drinks. Doctors have likened the cocktails to "a small bomb that goes off in the brain".
In letters to the country's interior, finance and development ministries and leaked to the press this week, tourism minister Aris Spiliotopoulos described the drinks as a menace that threatened to bring Greece into disrepute. He urged the government to not only set up special "anti-bombe" patrols but to allow places of entertainment to undergo control-checks late into the night.
The campaign comes as authorities intensified a crackdown on alcohol-fuelled tourists running amok in resorts nationwide. Crete's chief prosecutor this week described the situation on Malia, a resort that caters mostly to young British holidaymakers, as "uncontrollable". - (Guardian service.)