For Michael Walke, the end of his second marriage led to the binges.
“They would be like two- or three-day events, sitting in my chair here,” the retired hospital administrator and amateur actor said as he sat in the front room of his tidy bungalow on West Skyline Parkway in Duluth. “Drinking myself to oblivion and way beyond, and then getting deathly sick.”
Lori Hazelrigg binged while living in the tent city under Interstate 35 popularly known as Graffiti Graveyard.
“We would get up early in the morning and go to the CHUM, take our showers and change our clothes and eat something for breakfast and then walk around and panhandle for a drink,” said the soft-spoken Hazelrigg, who now lives in an apartment at Duluth’s New San Marco. “And we drank most of the day.”
Matt McIntyre’s drinking began to spiral out of control, he said, when he was still an underage freshman at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
“I had to drink every day or I had to use drugs every single day to get through the day,” the fitness buff from Woodbury, Minn., said. “I didn’t go to class unless I had something in my system.”
Alcohol is a legal substance, consumed by 7 out of 10 of adult Americans, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The vast majority do so with few or no ill effects.
[For more of this story, written by John Lundy, go to http://www.duluthnewstribune.c...stop-cold-one-or-two]
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