Earlier by Steve Sailer: American Indian Firewater Myths Are No Myths
These disparities are awful, but we know how to fix them. It's time to reverse these patterns of exclusion and invest in safer, equitable streets.https://t.co/PXZX1qsMyV pic.twitter.com/qbUU1jXtgu
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) March 24, 2021
American Indians, who didn’t evolve with alcohol until the last dozen or so generations, have a high rate of death while trying to walk home drunk from bars and liquor stores. From the Journal of the American Medical Association:
Pedestrian and hypothermia deaths among Native Americans in New Mexico. Between bar and home
M M Gallaher 1, D W Fleming, L R Berger, C M Sewell
JAMA. 1992 Mar 11;267(10):1345-8.
Objective: To determine the nature of excess injury mortality among Native Americans in New Mexico.
Design: Retrospective review of death certificates for deaths from unintentional injuries.
Setting: The state of New Mexico.
Subjects: New Mexico residents who died of unintentional injuries between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 1989.
Main outcome measure: Cause-specific mortality rates.
Results: Over half of the excess mortality from all unintentional injuries among Native Americans resulted from hypothermia and from pedestrian-motor vehicle crashes. New Mexico Native Americans were nearly eight times more likely to die in pedestrian–motor vehicle crashes and were 30 times more likely to die of hypothermia compared with other New Mexico residents. At death, 90% of those Native Americans tested were highly intoxicated (median blood alcohol concentrations of 0.24 and 0.18 g/dL [corrected] for pedestrian and hypothermia deaths, respectively). Despite the fact that most Native Americans in New Mexico live on reservations, most deaths occurred at off-reservation sites in border towns and on roads leading back to the reservation.
Conclusions: The possession and sale of alcohol is illegal on many Native American reservations. This policy forces Native Americans who want to drink to travel long distances to obtain alcohol. These data suggest that this policy is also the likely explanation for the markedly increased risk of death from hypothermia and pedestrian-motor vehicle crashes in this population.
As I’ve been saying, if our leadership’s new macroeconomic strategy is Money Printer Go Brrrrrrrr, spending money on pedestrian safety infrastructure seems like a better use than most. But I’m not sure if that would do much for Indians.
By the way, here’s a graph of total pedestrian deaths from 2010 (a year with low miles driven due to the economic crash of 2008) to 2019:
Sure looks like the homicide graph in which the Ferguson Effect added 22.9% more murders from 2014 to 2016. We see 23.8% more pedestrians killed by vehicles in 2016 than 2014: probably a similar main cause: the cops retreated to the donut shop during the First BLM Era.
