American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Alcohol abuse has been the most significant ongoing health problem American Indians have experienced since the mid-seventeenth century. The social costs of Indian drinking in modern society are staggering: Deaths related to alcoholism (including cirrhosis) remain four times higher for Indians than for the general population; alcohol plays a role in perhaps 90 percent of all homicides involving Indians; inebriated Indians die while walking along roads, either hit by cars or succumbing to hypothermia; 70 percent of all treatment provided by Indian Health Service physicians is for alcohol-related disease or trauma. Alcohol abuse at times appears among Indian children by age thirteen; most seek complete intoxication. There is even one reported case of delirium tremens in a nine-year-old boy in northern New Mexico, himself the son of an alcoholic father. Maternal drinking has contributed to the growing incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome and has led also to an increased rate of other neonatal problem. So intense is the desire to become intoxicated among some Indians today, especially on reservations in the West, that they mix cleaning solvents with other fluids in order to produce what is now known as "Montana Gin," a concoction that can cause profound somatic disorders, including aspiration pneumonia and organic brain syndrome, which can lead to death. These social and clinical problems have occurred in spite of the fact that North American Indians, so far as clinicians and medical researchers can tell, are no more susceptible physiologically to abusing alcohol than other American.