One of the biggest concerns in the Native American community today is the
             overwhelming presence of alcoholism. I was first informed of this by an old friend
             that I served with in the Marine Corps. He had grown up on a reservation, and had
             subsequently seen the horrors of this alcohol abuse firsthand. Growing up Irish-
             American, I felt a strong empathy for this problem, and therefore felt it would be an
             Suzan Shown Hario of Indian Country Today wrote an outstanding article recounting
             the horrific death of a 21-year-old Muscogee woman who was run over by a car full of
             Native American men driving around drunk in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These men even went
             so far as to fabricate a story in which white racists had purposely murdered this woman
             falsely believing that she was Middle Eastern. Fortunately, this lie did not hold up with
             the authorities and the aforementioned guilty parties are now awaiting trial and will hope-
             Suzan's article gives us an overview of all Native American problems stemming from
             alcohol abuse. Studies show that the "rate of alcoholism among Native Americans has
             been the highest in the nearly one hundred years running". On October 4th, the Health &
             Human Services Department issued the results of its national survey of substance abuse
             in 2000, indicating that the rate of "current illicit drug use" was "highest among the
             American Indian/ Alaska Native population," at 12.6 percent, compared with 6.4 percent
             each for whites and blacks, 5.3 percent for Hispanics and 2.7 percent for Asians.
             While these statistics indicate a very broad scope of the American Indian population, I did come to find that there were more articles directed towards Navajo men, and their
             abuse of alcohol. An article by Stephen Kunitz, with the Journal of
             ...