Online paper says Alaska's war on alcohol should focus on roots of abuse, not stronger laws

"Alaska’s war on alcohol, a costly and painful crusade waged for decades in remote villages across the rural vastness of the 49th state, has failed to help the very people it aimed to save. It has split communities, damaged families and sent an endless stream of young men to jail. Worse for the long run, it has stolen attention and resources away from the real causes of grief and dysfunction in Bush Alaska," Craig Medred writes for the Alaska Dispatch, an online newspaper. (New York Times photo by Angel Franco: Bootleggers in 2008 in Bethel, Alaska)

"Only rarely is this battle called a war, although that is what it is: Alaska's parallel to the national War on Drugs that has ripped apart the urban ghettos of America. The world of rural Alaska is not unlike the ghetto. The poverty, unemployment, crime, family turmoil and human suffering are much alike," Medred writes. "Alaska's war has cost, and continues to cost, the state and the federal government millions of dollars." And, he writes, the results have been limited. While an increased police presence in one area of 15,000 residents netted 1,500 arrests in five years, "The arrests have not stopped or even slowed the epidemic of suicide, accidental death, and violence that plagues the remote, Nebraska-sized section of Western Alaska that was studied." The cost for law enforcement and prosecutors in that area over the five-year period was $5 million.

While alcohol is said to be a factor in most crimes in Alaska, "A growing number of people examining the issue have come to the conclusion that the decades-long focus on alcohol has side-tracked any discussion of deeper, underlying problems leading people to drink, especially in rural Alaska," Medred writes. So, why do so many people in Alaska abuse alcohol? "Racism, a lack of jobs, being caught between the subsistence economy of old and the cash economy of today, young women leaving villages for urban areas, sometimes leaving badly skewed sex ratios, simmering tensions of domestic and sexual violence, the legacy of sexually abusive priests, and overpowering idleness," he answers.

"Instead of trying to address such complicated problems, it is much easier to blame alcohol and wage a war against it," Medred writes. "The concept is simple: If we just make people stop drinking, things will get better. But as Prohibition proved in America, as prison keepers throughout time have known, as rural Alaska villages have discovered over the course of the past three decades of 'dryness,' you can't really stop people from drinking."

And lawmakers and officials, such as Republican Gov. Sean Parnell, believe the way to stop the war on alcohol is with stronger laws, Medred writes. The result has been an increase in dry counties. But that has only led to dangerous home brews and bootlegging. "The first step to solving problems, psychiatrists say, is to talk about them. But there are problems in rural Alaska no one wants to talk about. It's so much easier to talk about booze." (Read more)