I know alcoholics drink a lot, but this is still kind of shockingly over-the-top. In the example of half a fifth of whiskey (we call that a ‘mickey’ in Canada, apparently that’s slang for GHB in the states), that’s actually only eight and a third drinks, which is about 20% short of the average of the top 10%, and that suggests that the top 1% is probably half again or even double that. This stat suggests that there are millions of Americans averaging more than a fifth a day.
3 Likes
Yes there are, i know some, and the united States isn’t even the hardest drinking country.
Edit
Ah,this explains a lot. I worked for a company that was Czech and moldovian, and they brought beer to staff meetings.
1 Like
I have a sneaking suspicion that at least HALF of that top 10% is actually just really bad at answering questions that require them to do math. Especially after 5 drinks.
2 Likes
We can certainly ban high-capacity assault alcohol. Because nobody NEEDS to get drunk that fast. It’s a perfectly reasonable compromise. Only low alcohol drinks can be left - you can still get drunk, you just can’t get hammered without reloading a bunch of times.
It’s for the children.
2 Likes
What about the belt-fed kind?
5 Likes
Yeah some sort of prohibition on the sale of alcohol should do the trick.
6 Likes
We should validate the survey against domestic sales data. But that would require, gasp, effort.
2 Likes
But it’s very hard to compare cross culturally. A liter is around 55.5 drinks, so France has an average of about 678 drinks per person per year whereas America has 511 drinks per person per year. But I think there is a different relationship to alcohol. I’m seeing 17% of French adults saying they drink wine every day and 40% a couple of times a week. Even if we say the bottom end of that means only one glass a week, that still means that the 5th decile of drinkers in France is drinking at least 0.7 drinks a week (and that’s an extremely conservative estimate), while the fifth decile in America is like 0.14. Averages are going to be pushed up a lot more by a large number of people having a few drinks than a small number of people having a lot of drinks.
Reconciling the title stat here with the WHO stat, if the top 10% average 74 drinks a week, that’s 3848 drinks per year each, which means that the top drinker are drinking about 75% of the alcohol that is being drunk. I think the stat suggests that America has a much stronger concentration of alcohol consumption - way more people who don’t drink at all or who drink one or twice a year, way more people who drink a bottle of gin a day.
3 Likes
I don’t doubt it. Given the prevalence of teetotalers in the US–and the social stigma many parts of the country have against alcohol consumption–we would by definition need a high number of binge drinkers to maintain our ranking on the WHO list.
1 Like
I also understand that in many of the highest drinking countries (eastern Europe, Russia) drinking is very common but there is a big social stigma around being drunk (i.e., being a loser who can’t hold his liquor). That suggests to me that they would have a much flatter distribution of alcohol in the population. I mean, you don’t get to Belarusian levels (17.5 liters) without some really big drinkers, but if you wanted to be absurd and just model it as completely uniform distribution, it would “only” be 18.6 drinks a week. That’s more than your doctor probably recommends, but nothing near 74.
I actually think your Moldovian example points out the problem with US drinking. Beer at a staff meeting is doing very little harm in terms of public health. When there is no beer at the staff meeting but one of the people at the meeting drinks an equivalent of beer all by themselves, you’ve got big health problem.
6 Likes
The US has the weirdest attitude to alcohol.
I wonder if there’s a holdover from puritanism leading to loads of teetotalers/abstainers, the strange restrictions on buying the stuff, and the large amount of heavy drinkers is a reaction to that?
Me, I drink pretty much every night, but rarely two drinks. My days of being able to drink several pints and get up the next morning are long gone.
5 Likes
“Slipping someone a mickey” is a phrase that I’m familiar with, as a Canadian… I wonder if I picked that up from US popular culture though, since I don’t know anybody that’s ever done it to somebody (obviously), and anybody I know that has had it happen to them has called it “getting roofied”, if they were comfortable talking to me about it in the first place.
That phrase baffled me when I first heard it. You can’t slip someone 375mL of Vodka.
Short for a Mickey Finn where you spike a drink to knock someone out but not quite the same connotation as roofie because common theft was the motivation. A popular term in the 40s and have you never read any Hammett or Chandler?
4 Likes
Successful by a choice set of metrics, I would suppose. High functioning hard drinkers are truly the source of many anecdotes.
Sounds legit to me. The sheer number of empty nips along the roadsides should scream something to us all.
2 Likes
I’d rather see it legalized and taxed like marijuana.
5 Likes
With a robust option for distilling your own.
Thanks. It is sad. I think seeing the sheer amount an addict drinks should make people pause and see how different addiction is from casual drinking. There is no pleasure involved. Only desperation and need. Perhaps if instead of seeing drinking addictively as just a more extreme form of partying people might treat it with the proper grave concern for the addict’s welfare. Then we might have a chance of finding a cure.
2 Likes
Yeah but New Orleans skews the numbers waaaay off the charts. 
(in a member of the Facebook group “We’re not alcoholics, we’re from Louisiana”)
3 Likes
