Town Turns High Life to Dry Life : Alaska: Barrow’s votes approved prohibition by just seven votes. Law is proving just about as controversial as it did in Chicago in the 1920s.

Jim Christiensen’s midnight police patrol used to be dominated by familiar, dreary tasks. He picked up binge drinkers who stumbled about--and occasionally died--in winter temperatures that sink below minus 40 F. He broke up domestic disputes of drunken men and women. He arrested tipsy drivers and cited beer-drinking youths.

Almost all of his work was somehow related to alcohol and its endemic and often destructive abuse in America’s northernmost town, an outpost nearly 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

But during the past few months, a remarkable quiet has settled over Christiensen’s work and that of Barrow’s other public safety officers. On a recent patrol, he found no one stirring in a battered public housing apartment whose hallways used to serve as a hangout for chronic drinkers. The streets--once alive with vehicles ferrying drinkers from party to party--were almost empty, as was the jail. Even the detox center had beds to spare.

“I’ve been here 18 years and never seen it so quiet,” Christiensen said. “My biggest complaint is that it’s boring--almost too boring.”

Barrow has gone dry. Because of an October election in which voters approved prohibition, the town that once barred the sale of alcohol but tolerated its importation and possession now bans booze completely. Possession of alcoholic beverages subjects offenders to fines of up to $1,000.

The ban, which went into effect Nov. 1, was approved by a narrow seven-vote margin, and prohibition in this town of about 3,500 is proving just about as controversial as it did in Chicago in the 1920s. Most of the town’s residents are Inupiat, the Northern Eskimos; their leaders, largely drawn from the ranks of local whaling captains, lobbied hard to outlaw alcohol. They said they’d had enough of child abuse and neglect, suicides, murder and accidents linked to alcohol abuse and hoped the ban would reinforce prohibition in smaller villages that had already gone dry.

“I understand that you can’t vote morality on people,” said Don Long, Barrow’s mayor, a recovering alcoholic who champions prohibition. “But this is an issue where the benefits to the community outweigh--by a heck of a lot--the problems.”

Their allies in the dry movement include social workers and doctors who have had to deal with the fallout from alcohol abuse. Dr. Pedro Perez, who practices family medicine at a regional public health hospital, said the stressed-out staff counted more than 212 hospital visits resulting from alcohol abuse in the final month before the ban took hold. During the next four weeks, those visits dropped to 35.

“People are sober, and we have time now to sleep through the night,” Perez said. “It’s been a paradise.”

Others argue that the ban may have curbed some drinkers but that others either become more secretive or leave Barrow to binge in the bars of Fairbanks and Anchorage. Many non-natives, as well as some Inupiat, don’t believe the government should dictate drinking habits, and they have petitioned for a new election that could bring alcohol back to town.

“I’ve done nothing to be denied that freedom,” said Tom Nicolos, a maintenance foreman for a local airline who founded a group known as the Freedom Committee.

Alcohol has long been a big part of life here in this isolated community that spreads out on a flat finger of land jutting toward the Arctic Ocean. The early winter darkness here is relieved only by a few hours of weak twilight that breaks just past noon, and gale-force Arctic winds often ground the daily jet flights that are the town’s only link to the south.

The Inupiat were first introduced to liquor in the 19th Century by New England whalers who made Barrow their Arctic base of operations. In the 1970s, alcohol consumption became even more accessible as oil wealth turned Barrow into a far-north boom town served by jetliners that brought new people, new supplies and whiskey, beer and wine by the case.

Barrow’s oil riches are linked to Prudhoe Bay. Property taxes collected from the oil industry have swelled the borough budget to more than $300 million a year. The borough has spent that money for new schools with swimming pools and indoor playgrounds, permafrost-piercing water and sewer systems, senior citizen centers and other projects, and it has created a new regional bureaucracy that employs more than 1,000 people.

Such affluence has lured a potpourri of newcomers to Barrow, including Hispanics, blacks and even a contingent of Samoans. Some are strictly short-timers here for the money. Others--such as Nicolos--say Barrow is now their home.

Nicolos is an ex-Californian who grew tired of working in a family business and decided to take the first job offered in Alaska. That job happened to be in Barrow. Within the past year, he’s moved into a new two-story house near the airport with a spacious kitchen outfitted with a 12-bottle wine rack. The only things sitting in that rack now are a two bottles of sparkling fruit juice.

Nicolos says he is not opposed to abstinence but doesn’t want the government to impose it. “This is not a decision that should be made by your neighbors, your peers, and certainly not by a government entity,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.

So after the election he organized a petition drive that quickly gained 477 signatures, enough to force a new vote. The petition drive garnered support from both Inupiat and non-natives, and Nicolos sees himself forging a bipartisan coalition. But the debate has taken on a sharp racial edge, with Native American leaders accusing the Freedom Committee of putting Inupiat culture at risk.

Mayor Long vetoed a City Council action that set the new vote for February, saying that state laws were unclear about when such an election should be held and that the community deserved at least a year of prohibition before the issue should be put to another vote.

In December, the council reconvened to consider overriding the mayor’s veto, facing a meeting room packed with Inupiat dry proponents.

“The Barrow Freedom Committee wants you to believe that we can live with a killer in our community,” said Delbert Rexford, a prohibition leader who opposed the February election.

“We have fought so long for this--and are beginning to see some wonderful happenings,” testified Morgan Solomon, a Barrow elder. “Our children are much happier.”

The council upheld the veto, then upheld it again when the issue was put to a second vote in January. Barring court intervention, the town is expected to stay dry at least through October, when a new vote may be held.

Patrolman Christiensen said a new vote might bring alcohol back to Barrow. But, in the meantime, he’s thinking about cutting back on patrol and donning civilian clothes to try to counsel problem drinkers. “We never had the kind of time to do that work before,” he said. “Now we do.”