Alcohol Prohibition Not Helping Native Americans Deal With Harms of Alcohol

[MindMover]

It’s hard to hear this coming from an outsider, but it is true. Every dry Native community I’ve been to has severe alcohol problems, and is ringed by border towns where it can be bought legally. I agree with the author here. Prohibition does not address the real problems we are faced with. Alcohol isn’t so much the problem as is a sense of loss and alienation from greater society. A relative of mine says that when people lose hope and feel that they do not control their lives, then drug and alcohol abuse follow. He was speaking specifically to some Alaska Native communities; places where tribes and clans once controlled and harvested vast catches of salmon and other fish, only to see their traditional territories taken, their clans broken apart, their culture attacked, their resources depleted, their land torn up in search of minerals, their children shipped off to boarding school, their language banned, their regalia and precious possessions burned, their villages shelled by the US Navy, and on and on and on. Creating a police state that jails our people for turning to alcohol is not the solution to these problems. The solution is to make our people whole again.

http://aianattackthesystem.com/2012/05/15/alcohol-prohibition-not-helping-native-americans-deal-with-harms-of-alcohol/