Why is alcohol abuse so bad among native Americans.

[ShinkanPo]

From Alaska to Argentina, native americans and their descendants seem to be far more vulnerable to alcoholism than any other group.

Ill say that personally as someone who carries native genes, ill say that my liver is 100% native because i cant hold my booze, but unlike real natives i also cant stand booze, i find the taste bitter and off-putting.

I only drink beer when in a grillhouse or seafood place and i order the lightest, most watered down version of it.

Reading a bit about it the only thing i can find is that natives have trouble metabolizing alcohol, but it says nothing about the addiction to it.

Also i dont think you can claim cultural reasons since its all over the continent.

Interesting so native Americans puke easily brcause they cant metabolize it but yet they love to drink? And gets addicted easily?


If I have bad reaction to alcohol I don't think I would want to drink it.


Really interesting because I would think they would be repulsed by alckhol.

 

[AC1D1K]

liquor doesnt discriminate

 

[aus101]

i always see natives as a people who find meaning in everything, and with the introduction if a primarily nihilistic activity such as drinking it may shatter their preconcieved notions of meaning which leads to a downward spiral.

but why wouldnt other ethnicities fall prey to it as much? i guess they have better distractions to negative emotion like industry entertainment ect.

They do, they have just evolved to process it. Aboriginal Australians suffer terribly from alcohol abuse and for similar reasons to the Native Americans.

 

[Bob Charlie]

In my opinion it is likely because of a combination of variables including the fact that people with less functional alcohol dehydrogenases stay drunker longer from ethanol ingestion. That means that there is an increased exposure time for their brains upon consuming enough of it to become intoxicated. They become alcoholic more rapidly as a result of this combined with socioeconomic stress and cultural dissonance that drive psychological depression and subsequently escapism behaviors including self medication with alcohol.

 

[aus101]

How do you think you'd fare coming from a background of derision and scape goating? How'd you like to see the president's faces carved into a summit....the same guys who stole your land, slaughtered your people and consigned you to servitude status?

I wouldn't like it.

Everyone regardless of race or gender has a hard time growing up, who hasn't had to deal with derision or scapegoating? People will attack you any which way they can. Growing up on the playground if they don't make fun of your skin colour it will be because of your hair, or your face, or height, bodyfat percentage, intelligence, popularity, wealth, and above all for no good reason at all.

Yet apparently statues from hundreds of years ago upset you? Those presidents mission in life wasn't "screw over the native Americans and black slaves". Nor does their image in modern times purport such things.

Meanwhile Hitler personally requested and named the VW beetle, Fanta was invented by the Coca Cola company so Germans could still drink soda during WW2 shortages and IBM helped perpetuate the holocaust (internal memos merely state the need to massively increase production of their high speed alphabetising equipment when they heard news of an incoming 3+ million polish Jews coming to the death camps).

People move on though, (as the West's closeness with west Germany and Japan now attest), or at least, if they want to function in society and not go around carrying centuries old grudges in a different age they do.