An Applied Analysis of North American Indian Drinking Patterns

Some American Indian societies have had alcoholic beverages and recognized the problems related to excessive drinking since aboriginal times while others have acquired these problems with the historic introduction of alcohol. These problems have become extremely serious with the breakdown of traditional cultural controls in a context of racial discrimination, frustrations related to low economic success, peer group pressures to drink socially, and the spread of patterns of drinking to complete drunkenness. Simple legal solutions, such as the external imposition of prohibitions and arrest for public drunkenness, have been ineffective as well as unjust, but there is evidence of the kinds of practical things that can be done to improve the situation. There is particularly a need to enhance existing social controls within Indian societies on self-destructive drunken comportment.