Violent crime is high here, much of it fueled by booze. Now, Bethel, the regional hub for 56 villages in western Alaska, is reconsidering its relationship with booze. And many villages, including Chevak, have banned the sale and importation of alcohol. But some residents say that the prohibition on liquor sales has only made things worse. This spring in Bethel, a local supermarket applied for a package liquor-store license, and to the surprise of just about everyone, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board said it would allow it.
Previously, the city council had protested each liquor-store license application, and the board had listened, and denied every request. In early October, the town will hold an advisory vote on the issue, allowing citizens to weigh in on whether they want liquor sold in town.
But there may be something different at work in rural Alaska, where villages that have tried selling alcohol have then recanted after a dramatic increase in deaths. Though making alcohol easier to access may decrease its allure, the dilemma of Bethel raises the question: Is it really a good idea to sell alcohol in a region where nearly all of the crimes, most of the health crises, and many of the deaths are related to drinking?
Europeans have had access to alcohol for thousands of years. But Native Alaskans have only had access to booze for a few hundred. Even when European settlers brought alcohol to Alaska, local laws prohibited them from selling it to Native Alaskans. When tribal laws banning the consumption of alcohol were nullified with statehood in , though, alcohol began flowing into the cities, states, and bush communities with alarming speed. Alcohol turned much of Alaska into a modern-day version of the Wild West.
In Bethel in , for instance, a local police chief was killed in a shootout after a man who had been drinking heavily threatened a cab driver with a shotgun and then turned his gun on the police officer, who had come to help. By the s, suicide and homicide rates in Alaska were five times the national average, due mainly to alcohol. Part of the problem was the rate of binge drinking among Alaska Natives, said Darryl S.
Wood, a professor at Washington State University Vancouver, who has studied the effects of alcohol on Native Arctic villages. In the s, the state of Alaska began to allow local villages some control over alcohol sales. Villages can also make it illegal to possess alcohol within their borders.
Currently, under local-option laws, 21 towns in Alaska ban the sale of alcohol, 42 ban the sale and importation of alcohol, and 33 ban the sale, importation, and possession of alcohol, according to the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Becoming dry has proven an effective way to reduce crimes related to alcohol, although only by a little, said Wood, who has studied the effects of alcohol bans on crime.
Dry villages had lower rates of serious injury caused by assault than those that allowed alcohol, Wood and colleagues found, in one study of isolated Alaska Native villages.
In a separate paper studying communities in Nunavut, a remote territory in Canada, Wood found that sexual-assault rates, homicides rates, and serious-assault rates were all higher in wet communities than in dry ones. This is markedly different than Native American villages in the lower 48, which sometimes see crimes worsen when alcohol is banned. When the Jicarilla Apache legalized alcohol, for instance, there was little change in drinking behavior or criminal arrests, he said.
And in , when the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota allowed package stores to sell alcohol for a brief window of time, arrests actually went down. In the lower 48, Native American villages are connected to the outside world by roads, and alcohol is easy to obtain for anyone with a car or a bus pass.
But the only way in and out of most Native Alaska villages is by airplane, or on the rivers by boat in the summer or snowmobile in the winter. Alcohol is a hassle to transport in rural Alaska, he said. Hundreds, if not thousands, of bootleggers buy alcohol in Anchorage or other big cities and bring it to Bethel and then into the villages. They hide it in their suitcases or tuck bottles into their boots or clothing.
They hide booze in diapers or pour out water bottles and fill them with vodka. Travelers just walk out of the poky terminal onto the runway, where they climb onto a propeller plane that takes them away. While I was in Bethel, I met with the three Alaska State troopers who are in charge of trying to prevent alcohol and drugs from entering villages. They sometimes catch people, as is evidenced by the arrest of the man with the leaky luggage.
And the knowledge that they are out there, looking for bootleggers, may deter some people from smuggling. But they are governed by the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure.
Mostly, the three officers, Todd Moehring, Jerry Evan, and Angela Womack, operate off tips from villagers who hear about someone trying to bring alcohol into the village. They go to the airport and, if they can find the suspect, they can ask to search his luggage. If he assents, they search it.
If not, they need to have enough proof to obtain a warrant. There is no stop and frisk here this is conservative Alaska, after all. The penalties for smuggling alcohol are also pretty small, he said. The plane crashed on takeoff and all aboard were killed. An autopsy showed the pilot was drunk. The incident drew attention to Red Devil, a Kuskokwim River mining town with about three dozen year-round residents.
Red Devil is one of the few places where liquor is sold in the Kuskokwim Valley, in western Alaska. This is because most of the dozens of predominantly Yupik Eskimo villages along the river have exercised an option under current state law which allows them to ban local sale and import of alcohol. But the law has not halted the alcohol-related crime and violence that residents of the villages say terrorizes their communities, breaks up families, and destroys their culture.
Many villagers point to Red Devil and other liquor outlets as the reason, despite their wishes, that they've been unable to stem the flow of alchohol to their communities.
So natives in the region and elsewhere in Alaska have pleaded with the Legislature to strengthen the state's local-option law: They also want the authority -- by majority vote -- to make possession of alcohol illegal within a community. The Legislature is expected this spring to approve a bill, supported by the governor, giving rural communities the ability to ban alcohol possession, an aide to state Sen.
John Sackett says. Senator Sackett, an Athapaskan Indian and a powerful member of the Legislature, traveled to 18 communities this past winter to listen to residents discuss solutions to communities' drinking problems.
Village residents say prohibition is the key to reasserting local control over alcohol use, and its advocacy is seen as an acknowledgment that government programs have failed to deal effectively with the problems alcohol causes. Alaska has one of the world's highest per capita rates of alcohol consumption.
Average annual consumption in Alaska in the last 25 years has increased by 80 percent, double the rate for the period in the rest of the country. Alcohol abuse is widely considered to be the No.
To reduce drinking, Alaska officials have launched nonprofit social services with an array of educational, legal, and prevention programs, Mr. Rural Alaska is one of the nation's most impoverished areas. In the view of Mr. Richards and others, Alaskan Native drinking is a result of demoralization and loss of control and of traditional roles and values. Villagers' attempts to prohibit access to alcohol is seen by University of Alaska researcher Stephen Conn, an expert on rural legal problems, as part of the grass-roots effort to reassert local autonomy.
The villagers' call for the prohibition option has more to do with their desire for local control than for an external answer to the problem, according to Tom Lonner, who while a professor at the University of Alaska conducted a study on rural alcohol use three years ago for the state Legislature.
According to the study, village elders can recall the time, before Alaska statehood, in , when the federal government prohibited Native Alaskans from possessing alcohol. Alcohol abuse was not much of a problem then, Professor Conn said, because there was little money in the Bush and no organized distribution network.
The drinking that occurred was closely controlled within the communities, which operate like a large family. But Conn says going back to this type of existence is not possible. Modern communications and transportation have made villages in Alaska less isolated.
As long as places like Red Devil decline to ban alcohol sales and are easily accessible to neighboring villages, prohibition is unlikely to work, Conn says. Rather than leave alcohol control to individual villages, Conn advocates regional solutions.
He proposes giving state health officials authority -- on the basis of crime and public health statistics -- to declare a regional alcohol-related emergency which would involve a crackdown on bootleggers and trading posts supplying the affected villages. They'd throw their resources into suspending sales, possession, and use until the crisis passed,'' he says. Legal challenges to the bill that would allow villages the option to ban possession of alchohol are expected.
Alaska's constitution has a strong right-to-privacy provision that was used to establish the right for adults to possess small amounts of marijuana in their homes for personal use. Already a subscriber?
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