• Treatment is crucial, yet funds slow to a trickle
• A family's love changes one woman's life
• Alternative program employs practicality
• Kittery leads way in prevention by giving youths a place to go
• 'Low-risk drinking' can prevent a small problem from getting out of hand
• Problem escalates among women; elderly learn to reach out for help
• 1997 deaths related to alcohol
• Team of reporters, editors, photographer produced series

Here are some of the key findings the reporters discovered during their six-month investigation into Maine's alcohol addiction:

Maine pays a staggering price for its addiction to alcohol: an estimated $1 billion a year - $853 for every man, woman and child in Maine.

Each year in Maine, alcohol buries at least 400 men, women and children.

Alcohol causes 50 percent of our accidental deaths. Fifty percent to 70 percent of homicides are fueled by alcohol. Forty percent of our suicide victims drink before they kill themselves.

Some 2,048 people have died in Maine's drunken-driving crashes in the past 20 years. One hundred and thirteen thousand people have been arrested for drunken driving in Maine in the past decade.

Alcohol, police and prosecutors say, is a recurring theme that runs through 80 percent to 90 percent of their cases.

Despite the clear need to treat alcoholic offenders, there is little or no help offered them once they're locked up. Only 9 percent of the 1,600 state prisoners receive any alcohol counseling.

One-third of Maine's families are headed by parents who abuse alcohol. Each year, 700 children are taken away from their families; in two-thirds of the cases, the parents are too drunk to care for them, or they abuse them while they're intoxicated.

At least one in four people admitted to our hospitals are there because of alcohol-related illnesses.

Ten percent of all workers are alcoholics or problem drinkers. They go home from work twice as often as their healthier colleagues; they use their sick benefits three times as much and are five times more likely to file for workers' compensation.

In 1996, 81 percent of the people in Maine seeking help for substance abuse were alcohol abusers, compared to 52 percent nationwide.

Nearly 52 percent of adults in Maine report that someone in their family has a severe alcohol problem. Nearly 100,000 Mainers are considered alcohol abusers or alcoholics.

Children in Maine are drinking at earlier ages now, and they binge-drink more than their counterparts in New England and across the country.

Forty-five percent of all high school students say that by age 13 they had tried alcohol; 8 percent of them say they were drinking regularly by the time they turned 13.

Some 35 percent of 12th-graders admitted during a recent survey that they had had five or more drinks on one or more occasions in the past two weeks, compared to 31 percent of their New England peers and 30 percent nationally.

Mainers have a fondness for hard liquor. The state ranked third-highest in per-capita spirits consumption among the 18 states that control their liquor distribution or sales.

Mainers rank 14th-highest among the 50 states for the share of spirits bought. Thirty-one percent of the alcohol purchased in Maine is liquor, as opposed to beer or wine. Last year, people in the state bought 1.7 million gallons of spirits, 2.5 million gallons of beer and 2.7 million gallons of wine.

The state government collected $64.4 million in alcohol taxes last year. Only a fraction of those taxes - $7.4 million - was spent on substance abuse treatment. That amount dwarfs the $1 billion it costs to repair the harm caused by booze in Maine.