Northern students defeated by substance abuse

One thing I’ve noticed over the years concerns northern students from the communities entering college programs in bigger cities.

Alcohol and drug abuse is, unfortunately, a very real factor for students with tremendous potential who lose out and quit their programs. This would include studies in the nursing and medical fields, as well as others.

We desperately need nurses who are representative of our people, both here in the Northwest Territories, and in Nunavut, to serve our own people.

I want to strongly urge our governments, colleges and universities to provide pre-college counselling for students so they can be ready for life in the big city, where alcohol and drugs are always available.

I’ve seen students with tremendous potential and capabilities give up because of problems relating to alcohol and drug use, whether it be themselves or their spouses. As a population with many young people, we need to look at this risk much more seriously than we have. We more often come to secondary or higher education as small young families, and not as singles when compared to the rest of Canada.

Yellowknife and Iqaluit are young capitals but both, sadly, are very lacking in providing good alcohol and drug addiction treatment programs for their main assets – their people!

On the other hand you will find, right now, crack, coke, meths, hallucinatory drugs, hashish, marijuana and alcohol. It’s odd, but true, that Inuit and Dene are much more susceptible than our western counterparts to alcohol addiction.

If we are to move ahead, we must begin at the roots. Healthy people make healthy choices. Unhealthy people continue living, more like surviving, in sickness and as a result, will continue to make unhealthy choices if there is nothing better to access that can inspire hope for change. This is so basic.

We can no longer allow ourselves to be defeated by a substance by pretending it isn’t there. We can’t afford to keep taking two steps forward and one step back in our dance of life. Things are tough enough as they are.

Providing services and dollars for our students, spouses, children and people in their communities and their cities, with immediate access as readily available as the cause, can change the terrible number of suicides and ruined lives, and will aid in reaching our potential. It’s a matter of our people, our lives and it’s a matter of importance. It’s also the time for the government to act on it.

Suzie Napayok
Yellowknife