There’s a small town in our state which has been wracked by alcohol abuse and its ensuing problems for a really long time. They came up with a plan this past year to help them to deal with it.
As most of you know, up here in some parts of Alaska, people have to order their liquor imported, and in Kotzebue that meant that it usually showed up at the airport and people would go to claim their bounty and start drinking heavily. Oh, and by the way, liquor was actually illegal here for the past 20 years, so it was black market booze that was coming in. It was a big decision whether to make liquor legal once again, but the idea arose to have a city-owned liquor store and distribution center instead that would take care of limiting the amount of liquor that people could take at any one time. The idea was that this would keep people from getting falling down drunk and binge drinking. Less alcohol available = fewer drunk drivers also.
The town is made up mostly of Inupiat Eskimos and it is located just north of the Arctic Circle. It’s a community of only 3200 people.
Some thought that making it legal would cause more people to drink. Others felt that this would regulate it instead, and thought that they ought to recognize that people were going to drink alcohol, no matter what.
Of course, this also brings in some tax revenue for the town, which helps to pay for the police and other services, some of which is related to the problem of drunkenness.
It’s an interesting experiment and there are a lot of other towns throughout our great state that are paying attention to see if this ends up being beneficial as they hope it will. So far, after about half a year, crime has not risen and some crime categories have actually dwindled.
