Hard Choices : Consequences

"You're never going to eliminate people getting their hands on liquor."
"The ingenuity that is practised to get liquor into dry communities is amazing; everything from taking a snowmobile for 100 miles, to making your own."
"People were drinking 26 ounces in 20 minutes, and then they were becoming violently drunk."
"All hell would break loose ... the nursing station, the social workers, the children, the schools and the police all go through hell for the time that the liquor is raging through the community."
RCMP Superintendent Howard Eaton

"You don't think as much about it as you did when there was restrictions. When it's prohibited, it's exciting -- you have to do it."
Bodil Paulson, alcohol-prevention worker, Greenland health department

"There's going to be more people bootlegging because they don't have to order liquor from Winnipeg, say, or Ottawa."
Nunavut MLA Tagak Curley

Canada's newest Territory Nunavut, is plagued by crimes related to alcohol consumption, even while liquor is completely banned in seven of Nunavut's twenty-five communities. While it is "restricted" in another fourteen communities a local committee scrutinizes alcohol orders for approval, but elsewhere drinks can be procured at the territory's scant few licensed restaurants or by ordering alcohol in by air delivery.

A dog howls from the hillside overlooking Iqaluit.
(Peter Power/Peter Power/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

In Iqaluit, drinkers can call in an order from a warehouse located in Rankin Inlet, about 1,200 kilometres distant after paying for a permit, a deposit and handling fees. If the buyer is very particular about his booze, ordering for example, a four-pack of Guinness, the order has to be flown in from 2,000 km away, in Ottawa, through securing a government-issued import permit. How Byzantine is that?

The result of the territory's alcohol-by-air protocol is that residents feel it to be more cost-effective to order hard liquor. When a plane loaded with liquor orders arrives, communities are subjected to nadness through an resulting orgy of violence and binge-drinking. "You haven't had beer for three weeks, so you sit down and one tastes good, and the 11th tastes good as well", it was explained.

It is estimated that in some Nunavut communities, some 95% of police call-outs are related to alcohol. At the Baffin Correction Centre in the capital Iqaluit, 90% to 95% of inmates are serving sentences that resulted from crimes committed while inebriated. Only two years following Nunavut's founding, it was reported by justice officials that six of seven of the territory's murders involved alcohol consumption.

A well-established network of bootleggers supply the people of Nunavut with the highest-priced alcohol in the Western hemisphere, coming in at $200 - $400 for each bottle of hard liquor, and roughly $180 for a two-four of beer. Nunuvut Mounties run regular raids on Nunavut liquor smugglers, but whatever ends up in RCMP hands represents no more than a blip in the Arctic black market estimated to bring in over $10-million on an annual basis.

When, four years ago Nunavut established a task force to stem the bootlegging trade in hopes of furthering the region's economic well-being, they concluded that the government should ensure that "beer, wine and cider be made more accessible." Superintendent Eaton, a member of the task force concluded: "I'm not a doctor, but in my experience people don't get as violent when they drink beer, and generally speaking after you drink a case of beer you have to go to the bathroom and you want to have a sleep."

Members of the RCMP detachment in Iqaluit arrest a man at gunpoint. He was intoxicated and allegedly carrying a knife at the time police were called.
(Peter Power/Peter Power/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

On the other hand, half of the territory's 31,000 residents are resistant to moving toward the liberalization of alcohol availability. Lingering in the minds of the elders is the dreadful social dysfunction in their communities brought on by the Frobisher Bay liquor store. "The fastest way to stop alcohol problems is to ban alcohol from Nunavut", stated one resident, uncompromisingly.

A study titled Alcohol and Violence in Nunavut that resulted in the early 1990s from a professor of Criminal Justice at Washington State University gauging whether communities could curb drunken disorders by going dry, concluded that dry communities suffered rates of assault, sex assault and murder as much as half of their wet counterparts. "We've seen the same thing in Alaska: Dry villages tend to be safer than the ones that don't prohibit alcohol", said Professor Darryl Wood.

RCMP Constable Shayne Pottie, 22, removes a young, intoxicated woman from a home in Iqaluit. This is the constable’s first posting as an RCMP officer
(Peter Power/Peter Power/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

Even so, Dr. Wood's findings also revealed that even though dry communities were somewhat safer, they still represented the most dangerous places in Canada. Prohibition represented merely a "partly effective response to the violence that often accompanies alcohol abuse." In Greenland which had also long experienced equally high incidents of alcohol-fuelled violence, suicide and homicide, strict alcohol rationing had been imposed.

And then, a few years back Greenland decided to adopt a beer-for-whiskey program that gave immediate results. In the village of Ittoqqortoormiit, the murder and suicide rate dropped from 7 annually to zero. Iqaluit police are bracing for a temporary upswing in chaos once retail alcohol returns, just as occurred in Greenland. But it is anticipated that when the "novelty" of the situation wanes, a more responsible drinking culture will prevail.