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TUKTOYAKTUK - In the streets of Tuktoyaktuk at 4:30 in the afternoon, I observed a man walking awkwardly, the wind to his back. Tripping and stumbling toward me, his grumbling was slurred and incomprehensible. The smell of booze billows from his mouth as he stares my way, jumbled syllables spilling from his mouth.

"I've been drinking all day," he said. His eyes are streaked with the red of blood-shot lines, like rivers of despair, drying up with each slag from the bottle of vodka sticking out of his pocket.

There are six or seven bootleggers in town. With no liquor store in the community, they are the only source of liquid escapism.

"You can get a 40 oz. of vodka, or whiskey, but most of the time it's vodka only," said a girl who can't be older than 17. "They cost $140 bucks to buy."

Partying that night will be expensive. The bootleggers, she said, "make more money than people who actually work."

"People know what's going on but no one says anything. The elders don't like alcohol in the community, but they don't do anything about it."

This is typical for the community of Tuktoyaktuk. The Beaufort Delta community struggles to find solutions to alcohol abuse - a syndrome that has a tight grip on the community. Alcoholism is widespread here - and so is denial, according to Sarah Krengnektak, manager of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

"They don't want to believe alcohol is affecting everyone in the community," she said. "People aren't willing to come forward and try to make a difference."

Krengnektak said community outreach is nowhere to be seen and if no one is willing to take action on the issue, the problem will continue to persist.

"They know who the people are who need help but they aren't willing to reach out and help them," she said, adding the lack of willingness by community leaders to make an effort to tackle the issue head on is a huge problem.

"We have unhealthy leadership," she said. "If we have workshops surrounding community healing, our leadership is not there. We need our leadership to take the reins and make true effort to make things better."

Bhreagh Ingarfield from Nahanni Butte believes lack of coherence in her community perpetuates alcoholism there, even though sales are not permitted.

"They are so fragmented in the community," the 17-year-old Grade 12 student said. "People need to come together as a community to try and deal with the problems."

Ingarfield is completing a documentary project on the youth perception of alcohol and sudden formation of youth gangs in the small Deh Cho community. She said she's found youth succumb to alcohol abuse because of troubled family life at home.

"The kids would come into school talking about how mom hit me with a pan the other day," she said. "The people there are such great people, but as soon as they get the alcohol it just changes into a nightmare."

The high school student said gang activity is being fueled by a lack of family support and connectivity and youth are seeking other ways of finding acceptance.

"These kids are looking for family and they don't have it at home so they're turning to gangs as a way to find that," said Ingarfield. "They do this so they don't have to go home to the drinking problems there."

According to the NWT Addictions Report released in July 2008, approximately 37 per cent of current drinkers aged 15 or older scored eight or higher on a test identifying harmful or hazardous drinking patterns. This means more than a third of the NWT population engage in hazardous drinking practices.

A public meeting was held in the Tuktoyaktuk in late February to discuss drinking in the community. It was decided among community members and leaders that alcohol restrictions would benefit the community.

"They talked about getting a restriction but I don't think it's going to go very far because there hasn't been any follow-up or action taken.

"If they were serious about it they'd continue and push and get things done. It's all talk and no action."

Residents of Behchoko will decide on whether to prohibit alcohol in their community on Wednesday, when they will vote on the matter. Addictions counsellor Joe Beaverho said the community is in desperate times. He fondly recalled an earlier time in the 1960s when people were in high spirits. Traditional games and activities helped keep alcoholism out of their lives.

"People got together and told stories about hunting and trapping," he said. "They would joke and you could hear laughter.

"Today you look at our community, our spirit is broken. Some still have high hopes to get it back. We need to do it without alcohol."

In two years, three people lost their lives to exposure when drunk.

"We have a lot of people going to territorial court because of drinking," Beaverho said. "We have younger kids, 10 and 11 years old getting into problems with alcohol. When you come from a family where alcohol is a problem, youth are affected by it. They see their parents, their brothers, a relative drinking and they think it's OK.

"We need to make people think about the issues of alcohol and look to heal the spirit of our community."

More resources are needed to counter the problem in Tuktoyaktuk. Krengnektak said it's not her job to help people struggling with alcoholism but she finds herself offering support because of the lack of systems in place to deal with the problem.

"There is next to nothing here," she said. "Since there is no one here I try help the people who are battling with it. It's tough because there are so many people."

She said the lack of support and her limited capabilities to help people cope is like a cork in a bursting dam.

"People just fall right back into the same thing because there is no help. We don't have any professionals to deal with that addiction so people tend to relapse and can't escape it."

To Ingarfield in Nahanni Butte, it's clear that youth need help the most.

"I grew up there and I helped out a lot with the kids and you see them, they want to do so many things in their life and then they change," she said. "They lose interest in life and they just want to sit and drink and abuse substances.

"But when you grow up with that it's hard to know anything else. It's hard to know how to be responsible when all you've ever seen is this type of life. It's heartbreaking."