Imgur has been inaccessible for me for months, they're one of those organizations that consider it proper to block whole countries to counter bot abuse.
The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.
There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.
It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.
That seems insanely dangerous. As far as I know, once you are physically addicted to alcohol, you can't even go cold turkey without risk of literally dying.
Proper (most) of the facilities which do this require people to stop drinking for at least few days before procedure, and some offer paid service isolating patient for a few days under supervision, and then do a block. In cases when patient is already delirious from intoxication these facilities can force one to go cold turkey, but at the same time put patient on the IV with some supplements and issue anti-psychotics (by doctors of course).
So in general the system is well equipped to not allow patients die from abstaining.
If you get DTs after drinking for months, you will get proper medical treatment as in any other country. The "coding" is usually performed after you have been sober for some time and "stabilized", so to say.
It does it "very rarely" if you only care about the most populated & richest areas of the world. It also blocks clients from the neglected "global south" all the time. FWIW, I too am stuck in a captcha loop, and these days I usually just bounce when I see Cloudflare captcha instead of trying to fight it. In your logs it probably looks like bot traffic.
I live in a region with a very severe air pollution problem -- the worst day you remember is nothing compared to the typical winter day here, trust me on this. 200 µg/m³ of PM2.5 is a pretty average winter day, and in evenings it goes up to 1000 µg/m³, and sometimes even higher.
(The yearly average WHO recommendation for PM2.5 is no more than 5 µg/m³; in my neighbourhood the yearly average is around 150 µg/m³).
There are also high levels of chemical gaseous pollutants which nobody has bothered to measure properly over the past decade -- last time the gas monitoring worked at all, it showed persistent levels of 120-200 µg/m³ of NO₂ and 200-800 µg/m³ of SO₂, among many other pollutants (there are definitely high levels of at least H₂S, HCl, Cl, and HF).
In the warm period (which is short -- no longer than 4 months per year) it's much better, although chemical pollutants caused by heavy industry are very high all year round.
Yes, everybody has sore throats all the time, you often hear coughing even if nobody around you is sick, and I curse my fate for being born to this every single day. Yet the average life expectancy is "only" 10 years shorter compared to rich Western countries, and we have so many other problems (like high levels of smoking, high alcohol consumption, high levels of saturated animal fat in historically popular home foods, etc) that I very much doubt removing air pollution will improve it by much.
We definitely have never seen any healthcare system collapse or anything like that, and our COVID situation also wasn't any worse than anywhere else. I personally don't know anyone who suffered any noticeable long-term effects.
In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.
https://files.catbox.moe/gilmd1.png
Imgur has been inaccessible for me for months, they're one of those organizations that consider it proper to block whole countries to counter bot abuse.