Would beer-wine store put more booze into Iqaluit homes?

I came north in 1963. During the 1970s I used to enjoy a beer on a Friday night. The over-serving practices at the local bars turned me off.

When last call was announced at the Legion, people would order as much as their table would hold and drink to excess, passing out at the table.

I’ve lived in communities where at first only some government employees, some construction crews, some HBC managers and some RCMP officers brought in booze.

Then booze came into the small communities under the guise of alcohol committees. The limit per month was more than I ever consumed in a year.

During the 1970s a friend of mine in one of the communities told me that he would purposely meet every plane bringing in booze so he could help unload the freight and purposely drop a few cases of booze so all the bottles would break. Oops!

I’m retired now. A lot of people I thought of as my friends are resting in the cemetery after a life of addiction to alcohoI, broken families and poverty.

I’ve lived in Iqaluit during the years when we had a liquor store. Remember the TV series “Mash” with the wounded soldiers coming into the hospital? That’s what it was like at our hospital then.

People froze outside in the cold of winter. The main problem then was that one could back up-the truck and take a truck load of booze home..There was no control!

For many the “limit” was the amount on the pay cheque. The best thing that happened during the 1970s was that Stuart Hodgons, then Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, listened to the people, used common sense and shut the liquor store down.

Fast forward to 2015. Alcohol creates problems for people in every country of the world.

People in Iqaluit are complaining that their fix of booze costs too much when they have to order it from outside the community. They say its their right to have access to booze and cause trouble in the community. They complain more about the cost of booze than they do about the cost of food or rent.

Life is more than going to the bar every day, right after work, staying there all evening and then going home under the influence when the bar closes.

For many, the above activity then moves to problems at the home and often violence. Ask the police and the staff in the emergency ward at the hospital.

The government proposes to set a daily limit. That limit may be a 12-case of beer and two bottles of wine per day.

Lets assume that the store will be open six days a week. That’s 6 cases of 12 of beer and 12 bottles of wine per week. Must have been an “alcoholic that suggested that limit.

Those that already have an “addiction” will go to the limit every day and spend more on booze leaving nothing to pay the rent and provide food for the family. The easy access will entice more adults, who don’t now go to the bars, to buy booze and take it home.

Do our elected leaders want to perpetuate the alcohol problems of today into future years? I hope not!

The worse part of this plan is that all this beer and wine would be in the homes. It bothers me to no end that our elected leaders would contemplate putting our children’s lives at further risk and risk more assaults between spouses.

Placing that amount of booze, readily available in the home will further tempt our teens to try it out. We talk about poor attendance among high school children. I can see the attendance situation getting worse once booze is readily available in the home.

If we think we have a lot of families who cannot put food on the table now, it will get worse for families whose earnings or government support will go towards the daily purchase of booze.

I’m not saying that everyone is in this situation, but, it only takes one in the household to cause this problem.

If the government goes ahead with it’s plan for a beer and wine store, our MLAs better have another look at the “expenditure plan.”

We will need more jail space, more policing, more social workers and more hospital emergency space, more medical staff and more shelters for women and men. Housing damage repair costs will rise, (we think we have a lot of broken windows now.)

Let’s use common sense, keep the booze out of the homes. Lets stop the bootleggers’ activities by increasing the fines and putting them behind bars and seizing their assets. Who the bootleggers are is not a secret.

Offer a good reward to weed them out of the community. I heard that the conditions at the correctional facilities in Iqaluit are awful, perhaps a good stretch of time at the no-star facility will make them change their thoughts about bootlegging in the first place.

Thomas Demcheson
Iqaluit

Email your letters to editor@nunatsiaq.com.

Nunatsiaq News welcomes letters to the editor. But we are under no obligation to publish any given letter at any given time.

In our print edition, we usually print letters on a first-come, first-served, space-available basis. In our online edition, we usually print letters as soon as we are able to prepare them for publication.

All letters are edited for length, grammar, punctuation, spelling, taste and libel. You may withhold your name by request, but we must know who you are before we publish your letter.