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 ...
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.
Well that has to change and fast! Force other races from their homes so we can have equal outcomes.
/s
With such a large percentage of death directly attributable to alcohol, if I was Alaskan, I'd at least have it as a referendum proposal.
There's something wrong with the vendors that sell to "Jimmy TwoElks" knowing Jimmy's drunk, has nowhere to go, is going outside in 5 below weather and the seller probably silently shakes his head and wonders if he'll ever see Jimmy again.
She doesn't have the money NOW? but what about THEN? or WHEN she last had it?
Been to Alaska a few times but never at street level, I was always hunting or fishing. Our Inuit guides would tell me about the alcohol problems within the towns and the family members lost. Most of the villages have banned all alcohol but it still gets bootlegged in. They fear for their children when they leave the village and move to town where it’s a war zone of alcohol. I’ve seen the same thing on reservations in Mew Mexico, Oklahoma and Arizona. My sister in-law is 100% Choctaw out of Oklahoma and her stories of alcoholism on the reservation is down right scary. She left as soon as she could, joined the Navy and later became an RN.
Alaska is a cold unforgiving place.
Nanook of the North also froze to death. For those too young to remember him, there was a movie short about him and his sled dogs. But on a trip somewhere the weather was so bad and he did not make it.
“There IS validity to prohibition.”
It still gets smuggled into the villages where alcohol is illegal. Once they leave the village and move to town it’s usually downhill from there.
They are out to soon with the “Homeless” stories. I can picture it now:
January 21, 2017
“Homeless freeze as Trump and Republicans party”
Rehab is not free, 3 to 5 days medical detox can run 10,000 dollars or more. Then you start the in-house supervised rehab and your looking at another 15 to 50 thousand depending on the facility, I’ve been through both. My Detox was 14 thousand for 5 days and the rehab was 37 thousand. I’ve been recovered for several years now.
Let me also add that Detox and Rehab only works for those who want to stop drinking, forced Rehab never works.
>Bodies also appear in the spring, as the snow recedes, often surrounded by plastic bottles once filled with alcohol or mouthwash.
It’s all legal too. Listening to those who always know better, one would think the bodies would be found with a half smoked joint and a slice of pizza instead.
Likker kills. Refer Madness is still a comedy.
When I worked for the Head Start program in Arizona, I worked mainly with the children on the White River Apache Reservation.
All native Americans have a problem with alcohol [that’s racist] it appears. My town, now a ghost town, was the first place that had bars outside the reservation where alcohol is forbidden.
Indians would be passed out close by ...
But, as to prohibition: can it be done based on race: Native Americans? It is and probably can be on the reservation .... but not by liquor stores and bars.
“Likker kills.”
No other drug does more damage to our society than alcohol, It kills and destroys in a multiple of ways and nobody is immune from it.
8 years with no homelessness! And now .... it’s back!
I think that might be true. I was in the army with a 100% native American. For the most part he was quiet and unassuming and never drank until one night he went into town and got drunk. When the taxi dropped him off at our barracks, he proceeded to start kicking in the car door then when he got upstairs to our floor, he then pounced on the guy who was sleeping in the bunk next to his and started beating on him.........
We broke them up and had to subdue Kai until he settled down. The next day he had no memory of what happened the night before and he never went drinking again.
“Let me also add that Detox and Rehab only works for those who want to stop drinking, forced Rehab never works.”
Precisely! I’ve had some experience in this department. The alcoholic needs to recognize the problem, admit he has it, and want treatment on his own. Never, ever should people try an shame an alcoholic into doing it for the kids, the wife, the job or whatever is typical logic. The drunk goes into rehab for himself and no one else.
Rehab is not for every alcoholic. Most will die from it, some will commit suicide. I know of one person that was forced into rehab several times. He finally blew out his brains.
It is theorized that cultures which did not settle in cities also did not propagate the tolerance for alcohol which enabled urban populations to avoid much water-borne disease.
Jimmy TwoElks drives his snow machine to the nearest town - maybe 50 or more miles away that sells alcohol (since alcohol is illegal in his town - like countless others) buys a case of whiskey, takes it back to his town and sells it to his customers for 2-3 times what he paid.
Jimmy TwoElks and his buddies get drunk. There is literally nothing else to do in many of these small villages in the winter. Drink’n & freeze’n is just one way - there are pills, other drugs, and guns - the boredom is often overwhelming.
In these small villages any referendum is to ban alcohol, not permit it.
The guy that sold Jimmy TwoElks was likely a gal in a large corporate-owned store where groceries are bought in $1000 lots and multiple carts by a single person. No one pays any attention to some smuck buying a case of whiskey - if you’ve never been to AK know that most of this is a winter’s worth of groceries for a individual/family or a commercial fishing boat’s trip supplies. Unless one lives in the city/larger town - trips to buy groceries are infrequent with months going by between trips.
They’re back! Just in time for the end of Obama and the beginning of Trump.
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