Alaska Ping!
Posted on 12/25/2016 3:22:01 AM PST by Cronos
As soon as she glimpsed the body on the icy street, Marie Nickolai knew it was Jackie Amaktoolik. He’d been drinking outside.
She wept “That’s my brother,” she said.
When homeless people die in Alaska, it is often like this: outside, facilitated by a lethal combination of alcohol and cold.
...Nickolai, 42, and her stepbrother grew up among eight siblings in the remote Yupik village of New Stuyahok along the Nushagak river in western Alaska. She said it was a childhood of picking berries, hunting moose, fishing and attending the Russian Orthodox church.
..laska has some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness and alcoholism in America. From October to April, when temperatures can fall below freezing in this city of 300,000, bodies turn up outside with grim predictability; they are found in cars, hunched for warmth near transformer boxes, or in makeshift camps in the city’s many wooded parks.
Bodies also appear in the spring, as the snow recedes, often surrounded by plastic bottles once filled with alcohol or mouthwash. The most at-risk are those who have poorly treated physical or mental illnesses and years of alcoholism. The dead are disproportionately Alaska Natives, police and homelessness advocates say, who make up 20% of the general population but constitute half of the clients in shelters.
There are about 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent housing in Anchorage, though many of those are living in shelters or couch surfing. At the last count in August, about 450 people were living in emergency shelters and in outside camps.
...the drug of choice in the city is alcohol. The rate of alcohol abuse among Alaska Natives is consistently the highest among all ethnic groups, mirroring that of American Indians in the lower 48 states
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Bush’s fault.
Addiction is a horrible disease.
Rehab works only if the person wants to change. I am ok with the state getting involved with rehab efforts in those cases.
If the person doesn’t want to get rehab, then they are probably going to end up dead.
You cannot force people to “want” anything.
There are many dry towns in Alaska where bringing in alcoholic is illegal. Native Americans tolerate Alcohol slightly better than small pox and plague.
Alaska Ping!
My sister and brother-in-law once took a vacation to Finland and were astonished at the amount of alcohol shoppers had in their shopping carts. Evidently alcoholism is quite a problem there too.......
“They’re back! Just in time for the end of Obama and the beginning of Trump.”
They never left, just ignored. Those of us who’ve spent time on reservations are fully aware of the situation. Today’s tribal life is not as it seems or is glorified to be. There is a war going on within, if you leave it your vilified and if you stay your destiny is very uncertain.
The interesting thing about the status of Native Americans is that Native Americans have their own reservations on which they have their own courts and additionally there are federal laws that apply only to Native Americans. So, I venture to say, the reservations have the authority to prohibit alcohol.
Had a buddy tell me about a hunting trip on a Jicallaro (I spelled that wrong) reservation in New Mexico. It was put together well with a guide and housing and extras. One of the other parties had smuggled in alcohol after being told it was not allowed. They were escorted off the res and banned for life.
They take some monster bulls off the Jic, I’ve hunted it and the Carson many times.
So this just started happening? Maybe Oblahblah can write a last minute EO to help them out?
I knew the homeless stories would be back under a non-demoncrat administration.
These chuckle heads are pathetically predictable.
Why so much? Other than gov funding, how are addicts supposed to get help?
Alcoholism, like diabetes, or even peanut allergies, can be treated if one desires to live more than one desires to die - we don't prohibit sugar or nuts.
If emotions ran our Founders more than rationality, the Constitution would have never come into being......
This is what not having hope feels like.
Sugar, some yeast and water is all you need to make alcohol.
Rather than banning alcohol, how about quit trying to social engineer everyone into the liberal ideal.
Gee, we never had this problem when Obama was president. Notice how social problems become so much worse whenever we elect a Republican?
Trump’s fault.
“Why so much? Other than gov funding, how are addicts supposed to get help?”
The hard part is about 95% can’t afford it. Detox is damn close to being in ICU due to the danger in alcohol withdrawal. The majority go to the ER and if they’re lucky they might get a full detox but then they’re released back to the same environment that put them in there. A facility that rehabs properly has to have allot of experienced staff on hand, including counselors, nurses and doctors plus there’s a maintenance staff to take care of facility needs such as cooking, cleaning and repairs. A 40 bed facility has allot of expenses.
Well it all really starts happening January 21
The media is just laying the groundwork, starting to frame the doom and gloom narrative
Think of this story as a teaser trailer
I’m a bit young to remember the first release of that movie in 1922. It was the first documentary, filmed by Robert J. Flaherty around Hudson Bay (nowhere near Alaska). Nanook did, in fact, starve a few years later when caught by a blizzard.
The elk are fabulous in New Mexico. I have never hunted them there. I hunt Wyoming for a few reasons: Cheap non-resident tags (its a lottery, but I get pref points every time and a Gen elk tag) and my sister/brother in law live in Jackson and have a spacious guest room :). and I get to spoil my nieces.
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