Our View

To fight alcohol problems, we must educate, collaborate
December 28, 1999
Over the past year, in a series of articles concluding today elsewhere in this section, the Tribune has documented the breadth and depth of problems caused by booze.
The fact is, alcohol touches virtually everyone‘s life and is involved in far too many deaths.
It costs taxpayers, it costs health-care consumers, it costs care providers and, most of all, it causes enormous rips in the social fabric of the state and the nation.
In spite of all that, we‘re not calling for prohibition or anything approaching it. Been there, done that, and it didn‘t work.
Indeed, if there were a realistic answer that could be posited in a single, short editorial, the problem would have been solved a long time ago.
No, as some of the writers below suggest, the answer to this complex problem lies along several paths, most of which start with education.
The title of the Tribune‘s series of articles has been "Alcohol: Cradle to grave," and that‘s just about how alcohol education should be approached: from cradle to grave.
Most schools, in part through the DARE program, already provide some alcohol education.
But efforts to encourage responsible drinking, recognizing trouble, and avoiding drunken driving should be stepped up, especially in the media.
Government officials and legislators, too, could stand a little more knowledge about the many down sides of drinking. Former Rep. Francis Bardanouve attests to that in an article below.
And that leads us to another path that makes sense, one suggested below by Dr. Dan Nauts, who heads the Benefis Addiction Medicine Center.
He calls for formation of a multi-discipline task force to "address service delivery issues." We‘d go a step further, suggesting that such an organization should take proposals to the millennium‘s first legislative session (in 2001) to plug holes in the help available to problem drinkers and their families, and to eliminate inequities in insurance coverage of alcohol problems.
Finally, the task force should look around the nation for programs that work and see if they have any relevance to Montana.
Alcohol abuse is one of Montana‘s oldest traditions and biggest problems. It‘s time we all pulled our heads out of the sand and dealt with it.