Drink A Lot? See How You Stack Up With The Rest Of The United States

Dan Regester11 years ago

Ever wonder how your degenerate drinking habits stack up with the rest of the country’s? Well, here’s that opportunity, and depending on your lifestyle, you’ll either be proud of where you stand, embarrassed, or generally relieved you’re not as big of an alcoholic as you thought.

From the Washington Post:

The top 10 percent of American drinkers – 24 million adults over age 18 – consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week. That works out to a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels, 18 bottles of wine, or three 24-can cases of beer. In one week.

Or, if you prefer, 10 drinks per day.

These figures come from Philip J. Cook’s “Paying the Tab,” an economically-minded examination of the costs and benefits of alcohol control in the U.S. Specifically, they’re calculations made using the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) data.

Generally, when going out in college, having 10 or more drinks in a particular night isn’t a big deal, but holy fuck–doing that every night, on a weekly basis, seems a tad ridiculous.

More than half of all the alcohol consumption in the U.S. is done by this top 10 percent. Even more terrifying is that if this 10 percent dropped their drinking habits down to the next decile, alcohol sales would drop by 60 percent.

They really have been putting the team on their back, but they’ll break down faster than Derrick Rose’s knee at this pace.

The only solution I can think of is for this 30 percent that’s on its non-drinking high horse to pick up a beer for the sake of the economy, and let the top 10 percent pump the brakes.

[via Washington Post]