Palin and Cocaine: How Common is Coke in Palin's Alaska?

Alaska, and especially the 7,000-person town of Wasilla, may not seem like a hot-bed of illegal narcotics, but as a former fisherman on Massachusetts' Cape Cod Bay, I can confidently say that small, seasonal communities are rampant with drug use.

The place I lived and worked on the Cape was a shell-fishing town, home to generations of fishermen. In Massachusetts, fishing is primarily a summertime game, and captains must make a year's worth of income off of one season's harvest. This means three things: one, that they are constantly stressed, overworked and worried; two, that they get huge amounts of money in a short period of time; and three, that they are bored for at least six months of the year.

The combination of these three elements leads many men to drugs, cocaine especially.

Wasilla sits just north of Cook Inlet, which opens into the Gulf of Alaska. While about a third of the town's workforce commutes to jobs in nearby Anchorage, the city holds 120 commercial fishing permits. At one boat per permit and four to eight crew per boat, the number of fishermen in the city is a small, but significant percentage of the population.

This in no way implicates Palin, of course, but it shows that cocaine is probably not foreign in Wasilla.

Drug statistics tell a similar story. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, one in four Americans between the age of 26 and 34 have tried cocaine at least once, and approximately 13 percent of all Americans over the age of twelve have done the drug.

Demographically, the ethnic group that used cocaine the most in 2003 was indigeneous Alaskans.

Alaska as a whole is in the top ten states for cocaine use, according to 2010 data from the White House. It was higher than the national average in all illicit-drug related categories, except for drug related-death rate.

Additionally, broken down by geographical region, the area that includes Alaska had the highest cocaine and crack use rate of any area in the United States.

But what's the big deal with Palin allegedly doing cocaine? In this writer's opinion, not much. If she tried it a few times, then stopped when she got into politics, so be it. If anything, politicians who make drug policy should have some knowledge of the topic (although it certainly doesn't need to be first hand knowledge) and life experience is always better than living in the dark.

But, if the snowmobile story is true, that is a different, more serious issue. Operating any vehicle under the influence is illegal in Alaska and the governor and mother put her own life and others' lives in danger during her snowy joy rides.

Palin is a polarizing, firebrand of a figure and will be subject to public scrutiny for years to come. While some of the criticism is surely unwarranted, some surely is.

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