This from Statistics Canada, the truth that's not fit to print

It is well known that a disproportionate number of Canada’s indigenous people have long had a troubled relationship with what many of them still call “firewater” (alcohol). As Peter Shawn Taylor shows on the other side of the paywall, Statistics Canada, a government agency whose role is to objectively and scientifically collect and distribute high-quality data, doesn’t want Canadians to know how problematic this relationship is.

Conversely, Canada’s earliest European civil and ecclesiastical leaders were more than eager to decry the effects of excessive indigenous alcohol consumption loudly and publicly.

History shows that the troubled relationship between indigenous people and alcohol goes back to the earliest contact with Europeans in the 16th century.

A key part of the history of New France (the territory colonized by France in North America, beginning with the exploration of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Great Britain and Spain in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris) is the story of the detrimental spread of alcohol use among the indigenous peoples.

As a colonial space, alcohol in New France, nearly all imported from France and the French colonies in the Caribbean, became inextricably linked to local consumption by the French and an important item of trade and commerce with the aboriginals.

The French first introduced wine to indigenous people at Port Royal. Although skeptical at first, aboriginals eventually came to enjoy all forms of alcohol's inebriating effects. By 1634, Jesuits reported that drunkenness was common among the Montagnais, and in less than a decade, intoxicant use had spread to the Upper St. Lawrence and Great Lakes tribes. Mi'kmaq, Algonquin, Huron, Iroquois, and Odawa, as well as other Nations in Acadia and Western posts, were similarly abusing alcohol by the latter half of the 17th century, according to missionary accounts.

The French King, the colonial Sovereign Council in New France, and ecclesiastics were very concerned over the alcohol trade and employed several measures to regulate its exchange over the course of the colonies' existence.

In 1636, Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary, reported in the Jesuit Relations that excessive alcohol consumption was having an adverse effect in the colony, especially among aboriginals. Murder, moral degradation, poverty, violence, and prostitution were viewed as some of the direct and indirect consequences of alcohol's obtainability, documented and condemned by missionary reports and further substantiated by traders and other aboriginals. By 1637, Le Jeune reported that alcohol abuse was rampant in indigenous communities, even among women and children. In response, missionaries, with support from some aboriginal leaders, founded villages in which alcohol was banned. They pressured the Catholic Church to provide support by regulating alcohol, and in 1658, the Roman Catholic Church declared trading liquor with indigenous peoples to be a mortal sin.

The first laws concerning the trade of alcohol with the natives appeared early in the history of New France. Samuel de Champlain first outlawed the sale and trade of alcohol with the natives in the 1630s. The first laws were aimed primarily at the French with the objective of cutting off the supply to the natives at their source. The punishment was often a fine, and in case of insolvency or repeat offence, corporal punishment was applied. Natives who were found under the influence of alcohol would be detained until they revealed who had given them the drink.

In 1668, the Sovereign Council legalized the trade of alcohol with the natives for all French citizens at the same time as they made it illegal for natives to get drunk.

The Sovereign Council's edicts of 1669 and 1679 prohibited the trade in alcohol with the aboriginals in their villages but permitted sale or exchange only in French establishments.

These and other restrictions were precursors to the prohibition of alcohol sales to indigenous people in early versions of the Indian Act and in the many treaties creating Indian Reserves.

According to the Indian Act (1884-1885):

Every one who by himself, his clerk, servant or agent, and every one who in the employment or on the premises of another directly or indirectly on any pretense or by any device (a) sells, barters, supplies or gives to any Indian or non-treaty Indian, or to any person male or female who is reputed to belong to a particular band, or who follows the Indian mode of life, or any child of such person any intoxicant, or causes or procures the same to be done or attempts the same or connives thereat ... shall, on summary conviction before any judge, police magistrate, stipendiary magistrate, or two justices of the peace or Indian agent, be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months and not less than one month, with or without hard labour, or to a penalty not exceeding three hundred dollars and not less than fifty dollars with costs of prosecution, or to both penalty and imprisonment in the discretion of the convicting judge, magistrate, justices of the peace or Indian agent.

Many early observers claimed that aboriginals drank solely to get as inebriated as possible because absolute drunkenness was thought to confer power to the drinker, and that such intoxication was a desirable state.

François Vachon de Belmont, a Sulpician missionary, wrote extensively on Native alcohol consumption patterns. A particular instance of the desire to get as intoxicated as possible among aboriginals was highlighted by Belmont. When an indigenous person had a limited amount of alcohol, rather than share it out equally amongst their numbers, as Europeans would do, they preferred to give it all to one person to drink to excess while the others remained sober. This was partly because aboriginals saw alcohol as a type of medicine that had to be taken in a large quantity if the drinker were to derive any benefit from it. They would have no interest in drinking unless they had enough alcohol to become substantially intoxicated.

Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune reported that having procured alcohol, Natives would sit and drink until the bottle was empty.

Chrétien Le Clercq, a Recollet missionary in New France, also recognized that the central feature of native drinking was to become as intoxicated as possible. He also emphasized the role of the traders, who purposefully got their clients as intoxicated as possible to deceive them more easily and rid them of their reason to obtain furs for next to nothing. He also claimed the traders were committing fraud twice over because they watered down the brandy they were selling to the natives.

A Jesuit is quoted as referring to alcohol as "a demon that robs (Indians) of their reason, and so inflames their passion that, after returning from the chase richly laden with beaver-skins, instead of furnishing their families with provisions, clothing, and other necessary supplies, they drink away the entire proceeds in one day and are forced to pass the winter in nakedness, famine, and all sorts of deprivation. The same Jesuit claimed that some natives even sold their children to purchase more alcohol. The social consequences of drinking included intoxicated children who beat their parents, young men who plied girls with alcohol and corrupted them while drunk, and countless acts of violence that often ended in fatalities.

In 1720, one official, ignoring the horrors brought about by the liquor trade, noted that natives became more docile and submissive to the French once given liquor, and they would devote their energy to obtaining more furs. Well into the 18th century, this logic behind the alcohol trade persisted; intoxicated natives would sell their furs more cheaply than sober ones. The practice of the double fraud continued, with brandy being watered down by half, allowing the traders to profit heavily from the natives.

Eventually, there was little hope of ever halting the trade as the aboriginals themselves began to be involved; most notably the Assiniboine, who became the vital link between native communities further west and European traders in the colony. This meant that by the early nineteenth century, the alcohol trade was still growing and expanding ever further into the continent.

These are historical lessons not only for contemporary alcohol over-consumption but also for differential indigenous addiction to all manner of other mind-altering substances, including opioids like fentanyl.