Why is there such a high incidence of alcoholism in aboriginal groups in Australia, America, and other regions? Is it solely a property of the newness of alcohol in those genetic groups? Did early Europeans face similar problems? I wonder if alcoholism in non-European groups is physiologically or genetically different from alcoholism in European groups. I know the disorder is related to how alcohol is metabolized.
You can add the aborigines of Taiwan to that list as well. I think the native peoples of the Americas and of Australia and Taiwan are quite distinct genetically, so I’d suspect it’s mostly a common cultural phenomenon rather than a phsyiological problem with alcohol per se.
No, alcoholism is a physical problem. That much we know.
So we can safely say that alcoholism has a significant genetic factor. There is, in fact, a test that can be done on infants to determine whether the infant’s brain has the physical predispositions to alcoholism. I’m wondering why aboriginal populations have such a high prevalance of alcoholic predispositions.
Alcoholism is a very complex disorder, with genetic and environmental roots. The genetic factor involves alcohol metabolizing enzyme production.
From “Genetic Influences on Alcohol Drinking and Alcoholism” (Hal Kibbey, Indiana University)
(For the complete article: http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v17n3/p18.html)
I haven’t found any support for this being the case with either native Taiwanese or Australian Aboriginals, but the genetic distance, especially with Aboriginals, would suggest that they lack the genetic mutations above.
Well from my understanding, in Australia the problem is almost entirely social. Here’s a brief overview.
They are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, have very high unemployment rates, high incarceration rates and the large majority live in rural areas. Education is almost non-existant. Health (including mental health) is sub-standard sometimes with one doctor maybe having to cover 4 or 5 hundred square kilometres (although most communities would have a nurse). In dealings with the law, Aboriginies invariably come off second best, and over the last 200 odd years, their culture has been, well, raped is a not inappropriate word.
at first settlement, the government policy was co-existance with the aboriginals.
Early-mid last century, the official policy was extermination.
late last-Early this century, the Australian government decided that Assimilation was the best alternative, ‘breed them out of existance’. Children were removed from their mothers, sometimes hours after birth (more common when they were 5 or 6) never to see their parents again. These children became known as ‘the stolen generation’. They were taken to boarding schools, allegedly for education, but in reality there were taught the bare minimum of what they would need to get menial jobs - boys were taught basic labouring skills, etc and girls were taught to cook and clean to become maids. Often, life at these boarding schools involved substantial physical and sexual abuse. (When the report on the stolen generation came out, it spoke to the children in their beds in the dorms night after night, listening to their schoolmasters walking up and down the hallway, and they would lie awake and wonder if it would be their turn tonight.)
Other children were adopted out to white families instead of going to these schools. Some had great adoptive parents, and have gone on to become doctors and lawyers, others were treated as virtual slaves.
Some people wonder why total disempowerment, having your children taken away (or being taken away as a child), being subjected to racist government policies (both direct and indirect), repeated sexual abuse, isolation, enforced poverty, destruction of cultural identity, lack of adequate aid and education can lead to unemployment, bad health, illiteracy, crime, and mental health issues such as depression and substance abuse. The suicide rate among Aboriginies is also very high. I don’t have the stats on me right now, but I’m sure I could find some if asked nicely.
So, you see some of the background that these indiginous people have? I’m sure it doesn’t need a genius to draw a connection between that history and alcoholism, but I’ll bet that someone out there can’t see it. I’ll also bet that their father is technically their uncle too.
I’ll leave it for there right now.
Bravo, big_yellow_kingswood, I couldn’t have put it better myself. As an ambulance officer, I get to see what you are talking about at the coal face, and I see the same symptoms repeated in the bottom strata of the rest of the community too.
I just wish that the ill-informed bigots that sling off about “lazy, drunk, welfare-bludging abo’s” could appreciate the issue from the same viewpoint that you have so eloquently described.
There may be some genetics to it, after all… The premise I had heard was that originally, humans all had that tendancy towards alcoholism, which of course didn’t matter, there not being much alcohol around way back when. Well, when folks started settling in big cities, they started running out of clean water. You need some way to sterilize t, or you end up with all sorts of nasty diseases. Europeans handled this by drinking alcoholic beverages to some dilution, which would kill many of the germs. Since they were drinking it often, they started developing a higher tolerance.
Meanwhile, most of Asia addressed this same problem by drinking hot beverages such as tea, made from boiled water, and the rest of the world didn’t yet have population densities high enough for it to be a problem, so non-Europeans didn’t drink much alcohol and therefore didn’t develop the tolerance that Europeans did.
Thanks, Chronos, that was all I wanted to know. And, looking at it now, that explanation makes a lot of sense. Necessity has always been the mother of invention. And thank you, big_yellow_kingswood, for your insight into Austrialian aboriginals and their plight. I know that alcoholism has social factors, but a physical and genetic disease cannot be entirely explained by social problems. It’s interesting the parallels one can draw between Austrailian aboriginals and American aboriginals.
Chronos, what you’re saying makes sense, but I have a followup question. Is it your contention that alcohol tolerance was selected for among European populations and that the selection was sufficiently successful that the genetic differences are noticible already, after +/- 4000 years of alcohol exposure? (Sexual selection could have done this, so I’m not disputing it, I’m just curious about what goes into this theory).
I’m afraid I can’t really answer that question, manny… Most of that is a combination of hearsay, gleaning of info from assorted sources, and reasonable speculation. I can, at least, give you a partial cite for some of it: In the (I believe) July 1998 (might be off by ± a month) Scientific American, there was an article about the role of alcohol in the development of civilization, and it specifically discussed the necessity of a means of sterilizing drinking water, and how Asians mostly solved this by boiling rather than fermenting.