Poverty’s Poster Child
In his May 9 column, The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof documents poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He writes: “As many as two-thirds of adults may be alcoholics, one-quarter of children are born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and the life expectancy is somewhere around the high 40s … Less than 10 percent of children graduate from high school.” The high rate of alcoholism led to Kristof’s previous column, in which he criticized Anheuser-Busch for supplying alcohol to the reservation.