A warning against underage drinking

I have served this community for 14 years and I have been privileged to be a part of the lives of many of the residents of our county in some manner, often at one of the darkest times in your life.  I serve as the general surgeon at Clark Fork Valley Hospital and cover trauma services at St. Pat’s on a regular basis.  I have been witness to many tragedies that are overtly related to alcohol in our community and I feel I have some authority to weigh in on the conversation we have been engaged in this past summer. 

I am not writing to criticize or slander the individuals involved.  I am going to criticize the culture of our community with regards to alcohol.  We have an opportunity here to better ourselves and our community.  Since I am a “hometown boy,” many of you can be critical of my own history.  But, like the majority of you, I was lucky to have survived my youth.  I can no longer sit on the sidelines. I can list a whole lot of families that would give anything for one opportunity to intervene with the decisions someone made under the influence of alcohol, but they no longer have that chance. I am sure you all can think of those families as well.

Still, we portray alcohol as a game, a party or that funny thing that happened last weekend. Yet 70% of the traffic fatalities in our county are alcohol related. Nearly all violent domestic crimes in Sanders County are alcohol related. 27% of the students in Sanders County say they have been binge drinking in the last two weeks.  If you drink before you are age 16, you are 5 times more likely to be addicted to drugs and or alcohol as an adult.  Underage drinking cost the taxpaying citizens of Montana over 250 million dollars in 2007.

I am not asking to infringe on individual liberties. I am asking us to be smarter for our kids than we were. I applaud Katy French for standing up on this issue.  Yes it was obvious that it was a lawyer up and shut up scenario which cost us money and seems to have gotten us nowhere.  If the only thing we learned was that drinking is a game that speaks volumes to the culture I am referring to. Now it is time to move forward.  I propose we have a conversation as a community about our culture of alcohol.  Do you want to look at your spouse, friend, or neighbor after the next eulogy and say we had a chance to do better but we just could not talk about it because we might hurt some feelings?  My e-mail is blade59859@yahoo.com if you want to start this conversation.