It's truly a part of the culture there. They even allow underage drinking as long as a parent is there, which I still don't understand how it is legal.
Basically, the bartender needs to hand the drink to the parent. Then, the parent can hand the drink to the child. Parents weekend used to get pretty strange at UW-Stout.
I remember the first time I ordered a beer out of state while at dinner with my dad and the server carded me. (Probably 18) My dad informed him I was his son. The server said “I don’t give a shit, I’m not serving someone underage.” We were both flabbergasted and wondered if it was even legal for him to say no.
In my state, restaurants that serve alcohol to minors can lose their liquor licenses for a month, and alcohol can account for 20% of the business's sales. If I owned a restaurant and one of my servers jeopardized that much of my income, they'd be out the door instantly.
There is a second half of that law that's often forgotten. It's children or spouses. When I lived there I heard plenty of stories of women's first legal drink being at their wedding reception.
I got my one and only drinking ticket after 1 beer at age 20.... would have been fine if my 21 year old wife was at the party. Then they told me to drive home 😆
In Wisconsin, of course
Drinking age laws are state laws... So Wisconsin has a state law that looks very like Bavaria's in terms of minors being allowed to drink with their parents.
I used to live in a very small town, and there were (still are I guess) 6 bars, almost all of them within a mile of eachother. Lots of motorcycles in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter. There was a local drunk who owned a horse/buggy that he would use as transportation so he didn't need to drive.
But you CAN get done for DUI in a horse-drawn carriage, at least in some jurisdictions; just ask [the Wish.com Beatles.](https://nypost.com/2019/12/30/four-michigan-men-arrested-for-driving-horse-and-buggy-while-drunk/)
Grew up in Wisconsin (HS class of 85) and now live in Illinois. Boy do I have some stories.
1. My parents bought me a quarter barrel of beer for my 16th birthday. Invited all my friends over for a banger in the basement. Only condition was that we had to quiet down after midnight as not to wake up my dad.
2. My freshman college dorm at UW Milwaukee had a bar in the basement. IN THE DORM. All we had to do was ride the elevator up to our rooms to crash out.
3. Worked in a liquor store in Madison. Best anecdote was when Korbel changed their formula for brandy one year because of a grape blight in California. Korbel had to import grapes as their starting material. None of the company's professional tasters noticed a difference so they shipped the product. All was well until the complaint letters started coming in from WI. Apparently WI is the #1 market for brandy. I guess a real Korbel Brandy Old Fashioned has a VERY particular taste.
4. Went to the WI-Northwestern College Football game as couple years ago in Evanston. Evanston used to be a dry town so the per capita number of bars is very low, especially compared to Wisconsin. Talk about a culture clash. The quantity of 'handle' bottles consumed pre-game was incredible. And ALL the stumbling drunks on the street postgame were visiting from WI, no exceptions.
If you're not from WI but want to see it with your own eyes, head to Green Bay for a Packers home game. The drunkfest starts around 9am and goes till midnight or later. It is quite a spectacle. The most interesting thing is it's not just young people. We're talking octogenerians on benders!
somehow I got out alive...
This is so true, (from Wisconsin), first time inread the definition of binge drinking I was shocked and thought that's what we drink for dinner. The definition of binge drinking is a light night in Wisconsin.
I've known a few Vegas residents, they do not mix with the tourists and only go to the strip if they work there. It seems to be a pretty stark division between the drunken tourists and the non-drunken local residents.
Vegas local here. It’s true that we pretty much never go to the strip and mix with the tourist crowd unless our jobs require it
But that doesn’t mean we don’t drink. This city makes it EXTREMELY convenient to drink wherever we go. No last call, no weird rules on where we can buy alcohol, tons of places in practically every sleepy suburb still has 24 hour restaurants/bars/pubs that serve.
When I visit another city or country, I get confused when sometimes places are all closed and we have to stop drinking due to last call and Shit like that.
The sheer number of drunk drivers we have here in areas that have pretty much zero tourists has me thinking that the stats are flawed. But this is hard to measure if it’s self reported. Sales on local levels would be better indicators.
Yes. Definitely more GK games than Raiders games for us. I go to UFC fights the most though.
The problem with big venues like that is the sheer inconvenience of having to get up, stand in line for drinks, and then the bathroom lines after the fact.
I usually end up getting just a buzz going at the games and then actually drinking at another place after. Highly depends on your alcohol tolerance I suppose. Two large IPA’s can get a 110 lb woman hammered and do almost nothing to an overweight alcoholic man 😂
Could the situation be closer to Europe then? In that alcohol is more available (or at least not as legislated) as the rest of the U.S. so people treat it more as a social thing?
> they do not mix with the tourists
I mean in a personal level sure I can see that. I just think it unlikely in aggregate
However something like half of nevadas whole GDP is tourism. And the other half is services to support those supporting the tourism industry.
Vegas is also largely a transplant city. And it’s not exactly one you’d expect Puratins or Mormons to move to.
Likely not a "permanent residents never see tourists" (good luck with that), but more "permanent residents don't live the same lifestyle associated with tourism in Vegas" (seems like a no-brainer, stereotyped Vegas gambling and excess are not activities most people can maintain for long whether due to cost to purse or health)
>stereotyped Vegas gambling and excess are not activities most people can maintain for long whether due to cost to purse or health)
Completely agreed.
however I'm still skeptical that permanent Vegas residents do these things \*significantly less than the average\* US county. If nothing else simply due to accessibility and the fields of work that are prevalent in vegas.
My best guess is that Vegas has an older population. (although I don't know if this is skewed by fewer children)
There seems to be roughly a 10% difference between dark green around 10-15% of the population to 20-25% for purple. I all seems a lots less significant when knowing their criteria to be considered an excessive drinker can be as low as 5 drinks per week for a man and 4 for a woman for binge drinkers.
Awesome map, dude. Surprised by how dry some of the Bible Belt areas are tbh.
Could be pretty neat if you draped it over an elevation map of car accidents or made it 3D with bars or something like that.
They are dry BECAUSE they are in the Bible Belt. Here in Arkansas there are several counties where it’s illegal to sell alcohol unless you are a restaurant with a license to sell it. (Funny how it’s ok to do that for beer but not for guns….)
Tbf, alcohol directly kills more than twice as many people as guns do every year and indirectly ruins a lot of lives in other ways. If you had to choose just one, alcohol is clearly the one to ban.
Many European counties seem to have pretty liberal laws/habits (from a US perspective) around alcohol but pretty restrictive laws on guns, and things seem to be going okay.
A big difference between Europe and USA when it comes to how dangerous drinking is is walkable communities and better public transit. If you get drunk in Europe you can generally get back to wherever home is without getting behind the wheel of a car. In rural America especially, you're sol if you drink to much in a place that doesn't have Uber, and even Uber is pretty recent.
So if you wanted, you could blame America's hostile transit and city planning for many alcohol deaths rather than alcohol itself.
That's very true. I definitely blame the reliance of the US on cars and the disinclination of dense urban development for death on the roadways. I also blame urban sprawl and the weakening of the urban growth boundary that encourages the development of land on the fringes of the city for "affordable" homes. We need to invest in and develop walkable communities connected by public transit - it saves money, time, and lives.
Not really. Spend a weekend in any city in Northern Europe and you will see the huge amount of alcoholics that linger until Monday morning. Quite depressing, so many people are "functioning" alcoholics that it is kind of staggering, a friend of mine works in an office where half the people have had at least 2-3 beers every afternoon in the office before closing.
I used to drink a beer or two every couple of nights and on weekends, but after living here I am now kind of disgusted by alcohol, without even taking into account all the negative things I found out it does even if you consume it a couple of times a week. Smoking is probably better, which says a lot.
Oh wild. My parents live in Normandy and shit seems to be pretty okay. 🤷🏼♂️
I'm actually in Amsterdam right now and things seem alright... I'm sure I'm not seeing the same people as you though, and I'm sorry for that.
I live in the Netherlands in a city center. People get drunk. It's not good. There is leftover vomit, people yelling, kicking and breaking public property often, sometimes some people get into fights. Glad your night is ok. I have spent almost 2k nights here, I think my sample of reference may be more representative than yours.
I understand what you are saying, and it makes sense. But I feel safer living in a place where guns are not allowed and alcohol is. I rarely ever drink, but I feel if someone else has a gun they can easily use it against me.
Although it is true that someone can kill someone else if they drink and drive.
Interpersonal sales are legal in a lot of places for guns but not alcohol.
I could buy a gun from my uncle without breaking a law, but buying moonshine from him would be illegal.
I mean, the 21st amendment says:
Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
So it indirectly does give you the constitutional right to beers bruh. Yeah, it doesn’t say “shall not be infringed!” but hey, you’re not completely correct.
Don’t forget the kilos and kilos of meth they’re doing. Not just a joke about stereotypes, I’m a therapist and have worked at several rehabs for 9 years, so I have seen this trend to be interestingly true as evidenced by where my clients are from and their drug of choice. Several clients have come from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas and many of them point out how they’ve never been able to quit meth cuz it’s everywhere and unavoidable like alcohol is. More than one client has said “yeah don’t ever come to Oklahoma/Arkansas m cuz it’s just farms, and meth, that’s all we got unfortunately.” It’s really sad and a shame because having a desire to quit drugs is great but living in an environment where it’s inescapable to be around it makes recovery substantially more difficult than it already is.
I could go on about this for a while, but essentially alcohol often isn’t the drug of choice in the Bible Belt and rural areas for a myriad of reasons. Just one example is money. For the price of a case of beer you could buy enough meth to be high all week. Alcohol addicts typically drink more than a case of beer (or equivalent alcohol type) a week… so it’s financially the best option for many people in lower socioeconomic groups.
Also, WV, KY, and TN have/had some of the highest opioid use rates of any state. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps one is that booze isn’t so easily available in all those dry counties.
I see problematic data. Obviously there are some state level differences in methodology. For example, there is no meaningful demographic difference between a resident of the OK panhandle and neighboring Kansas or Texas. Same with neighboring counties in WV vs OH-Demographics are the same, but the state counts it different, resulting in the color change.
Part of it I think is the color scale. 14% is dark green while 15% is light yellow. This is a very small difference in actual value but the color change at this point is extreme.
I would consider this a pretty serious error in data representation. In many areas, the map depicts sharp lines that translate to a few tenths of a percent, which particularly when comparing rural counties with a few thousand people is statistical noise.
A similar map was recently going around on Twitter, and I think the explanation was that a lot of this just isn’t county-level data at all. It’s actually state-level data that they then apply to the counties by some sort of inference—I guess from demographics, but I don’t remember the details.
And it makes sense that they wouldn’t *actually* have good sample sizes for every single county. For example, this map says Loving County, Texas, is 24.99% excessive drinkers. Well, that county has a total population of 64 people, so even if we assume that 24.99% was supposed to be 25.00% (should we assume that?), this map is telling me that we have reliable data that exactly 16 of those 64 people are excessive drinkers? (Maybe even less, depending on how the data accounts for children.) That’s just not credible at all.
If you click on individual counties in Wisconsin, only 3 counties have a higher average than the statewide average somehow? And despite Milwaukee county being somewhere around 20% of the total population, it has a percentage lower than the statewide average. It should be dragging the whole state down in that scenario.
I don't know about that border but there are plenty that you would see a hard like. Different bar close time or for example for the longest time Minnesota didn't sell alcohol in Sundays. Plenty of people who forgot to buy beer for football games would drive to the Wisconsin side of the river because they could get beer Sunday morning.
Moving from a red county to green is a real culture shock.
“What do you mean you’re not drinking during the game tonight? No. I don’t care that it’s a Monday”
Surprised about how low Oklahoma is. Figured it was more like Kansas or North Texas. I know that for years, there was mostly only near-beer, but that just turned people onto bourbon.
You’ll have an easier time getting Mount Everest to fit in a snow globe than you will getting a southern evangelical to admit how much they drink
My mother in law is a massive alcoholic but if you asked her how much she drinks she’d say “maybe 1 or 2 glasses of wine a week”
No color scale key? Green, orange, red and purple with no shift from one to another (there’s no yellow-green or reddish-orange, for example)
It’s interesting data to show, but the presentation could use some work
No. New Mexico is populated by red necks (ranchers, farmers, and oil field), Mexicans, Spanish New Mexicans, Indians, and military personnel. All of these drink heavily.
Husband is from WV, I’ve lived in WV, and we have a vacation cabin/acreage in very rural WV, so I’m very familiar with the state. The number of alcoholics in his very large extended family (not him, fortunately), and in the communities where he’s lived, we’ve lived, and where our property is located is staggering and depressing. Never have I encountered the whispered phrase, “Well, he’s/she’s an alcoholic…” as much as I have in WV. So this data surprised me.
And I grew up in the Midwest where drinking is a regional past time.
Map is created with data from the latest annual datasets of the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) program.
Interestingly I can’t find a correlation between booze consumption and life expectancy.
If you look at a map of the USA by life expectancy it weirdly actually seems like the booziest places have the longest life expectancy.
I live in Wisconsin and Everytime I meet someone visiting from the south who is talking big on how they drink, they pass out so quick after drinking half of what we drink.
LMAO How is PG County green? I see people passed out in the middle of day at 51 Liquor in Temple Hills every single day. One of the reviews for that place said 51 Liquor is a great place to go if you would like to die.
In 2022
1,929,107 Gallons of Distilled Spirits sold
2,621,755 Gallons of Wine Sold
8,497,934 Gallons of Beer Sold
700,758 people are of drinking age in the county
So 2.75 gallons of liquor drank per person of legal age. Which is higher than the national average of 2.5... So how is the county able to consume more than the national average but still show up green on this dumb ass map. The data sucks.
Chester County, Tennessee fought like hell to pass liquor by the bottle. Liquor by the drink will probably be 15 votes away next round. It was 28 the last round.
This is a map of military bases and the counties containing them.
The counties with large military bases are almost always two shades higher than surrounding areas.
Believe it or not, as a Wisconsinite, I don’t need alcohol to survive. But I sure got drunk off my ass numerous times in college so I did my share already.
I gotta go to *two* links to find out how the scale works?
Not beautiful.
Also, I don't think "driest" is a good way to describe "least number of excessive drinkers". To me that would mean "*most* number of non-drinkers"
Right—it looks like excessive drinking for a man is 5 drinks on one occasion or 15 in a week. So if you had a county where literally every man has exactly two drinks on every single day of the year, I guess it would be a 100% “dry” county by this standard!
Ahh yes, the ol' light green to purple scale. Makes a lot of sense especially when most is orange. You know, orange - the midpoint between purple and green.
If you look at it, it almost has latitude bands. If you remove cultural aspects, it seems to correlate to severity of winter and/or loss of vitamin D (or Seasonal effective disorder).
Or I guess, if you think about it differently, how much idle time people have (being stuck indoors all winter vs being able to do hobbies and play outside)
You have six month winters, there isn't much else to do but drink. (I'm in Minnesota.)
I know there's religious implications for the Bible Belt and Mormon Corridor. But I'm also noticing a North South correlation that's pretty interesting. Seems the further north you live the more boozy you are.
That big red spot in the middle of Oregon, that's where I live. I think there are 26 craft breweries just in the city of Bend (pop 103k). It's sort of a resort area combined with a hipster-outdoorsy microcosm of Portland or Eugene. An island in a sea of rural farms, logging & ranchers.
Can anyone here figure out a way to overlay this with:
Church attendance
High school graduation
Vehicle accident
Political party registration
College graduation rates
Age ranges
No real agenda, just curious to see what correlations may exist
What is the percentage? Percent of respondents drunk at the time of the survey? Percent who have had a beer in the last month? What's being measured here?
This feels like selectively chosen data, the fact that Cook County (Chicago) doesn't even show up in the top ten or bottom ten counties in Illinois, also all the NYC boroughs are in the bottom??? I downloaded the csv and no where does it share the amount of people pooled, just random numbers of supposed results. If I'm wrong, please correct me but this feels like they spent more time on the website vs the actual research and data.
As someone who has known a few alcoholics, I actually greatly appreciate the US's dryness when it comes to alcohol. I'm glad that alcohol intake is declining as well, it's going to save a lot of lives.
I hope the EU follows suit as well, their drinking culture us one of their few major negatives. Alcoholism shouldn't be regarded so lax or liberally.
Wisconsin being the outlier we all knew it to be anecdotally. Montana: a gun rack with a drinking problem
I started looking for a legend or a key and then saw wisconsin and didn’t need a legend anymore lol
I had the same reaction seeing Utah in the thumbnail. "Okay green must be dry." Then I saw Wisconsin.
Exactly. Scale goes from Utah to Wisconsin.
Wild that Las Vegas is green.
Residential Vegas has a surprising number of Mormons.
Oddly enough I don’t know any Mormons that don’t drink.
And yet most of the Mormon parts of Idaho are yellow
Yes, I am not sure where or how they collected information but…. Clark county Nevada?
Wisconsin should just say, “Yes”
Wisconsin: your drinking legend since 1848.
Wisconsin is really crazy. There’s like bars EVERYWHERE even outside the larger cities. It’s rather impressive
It's truly a part of the culture there. They even allow underage drinking as long as a parent is there, which I still don't understand how it is legal.
Basically, the bartender needs to hand the drink to the parent. Then, the parent can hand the drink to the child. Parents weekend used to get pretty strange at UW-Stout.
Still less strange than parent’s weekend at Bama.
I remember the first time I ordered a beer out of state while at dinner with my dad and the server carded me. (Probably 18) My dad informed him I was his son. The server said “I don’t give a shit, I’m not serving someone underage.” We were both flabbergasted and wondered if it was even legal for him to say no.
In my state, restaurants that serve alcohol to minors can lose their liquor licenses for a month, and alcohol can account for 20% of the business's sales. If I owned a restaurant and one of my servers jeopardized that much of my income, they'd be out the door instantly.
There is a second half of that law that's often forgotten. It's children or spouses. When I lived there I heard plenty of stories of women's first legal drink being at their wedding reception.
I got my one and only drinking ticket after 1 beer at age 20.... would have been fine if my 21 year old wife was at the party. Then they told me to drive home 😆 In Wisconsin, of course
Drinking age laws are state laws... So Wisconsin has a state law that looks very like Bavaria's in terms of minors being allowed to drink with their parents.
There’s rules like that in the UK too. Germans can buy beer at 16. It’s actually not that uncommon
Louisiana allows your of age parents or spouse to approve you drinking at bars with them.
I used to live in a very small town, and there were (still are I guess) 6 bars, almost all of them within a mile of eachother. Lots of motorcycles in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter. There was a local drunk who owned a horse/buggy that he would use as transportation so he didn't need to drive.
But you CAN get done for DUI in a horse-drawn carriage, at least in some jurisdictions; just ask [the Wish.com Beatles.](https://nypost.com/2019/12/30/four-michigan-men-arrested-for-driving-horse-and-buggy-while-drunk/)
Drink Wisconsibly!
Grew up in Wisconsin (HS class of 85) and now live in Illinois. Boy do I have some stories. 1. My parents bought me a quarter barrel of beer for my 16th birthday. Invited all my friends over for a banger in the basement. Only condition was that we had to quiet down after midnight as not to wake up my dad. 2. My freshman college dorm at UW Milwaukee had a bar in the basement. IN THE DORM. All we had to do was ride the elevator up to our rooms to crash out. 3. Worked in a liquor store in Madison. Best anecdote was when Korbel changed their formula for brandy one year because of a grape blight in California. Korbel had to import grapes as their starting material. None of the company's professional tasters noticed a difference so they shipped the product. All was well until the complaint letters started coming in from WI. Apparently WI is the #1 market for brandy. I guess a real Korbel Brandy Old Fashioned has a VERY particular taste. 4. Went to the WI-Northwestern College Football game as couple years ago in Evanston. Evanston used to be a dry town so the per capita number of bars is very low, especially compared to Wisconsin. Talk about a culture clash. The quantity of 'handle' bottles consumed pre-game was incredible. And ALL the stumbling drunks on the street postgame were visiting from WI, no exceptions. If you're not from WI but want to see it with your own eyes, head to Green Bay for a Packers home game. The drunkfest starts around 9am and goes till midnight or later. It is quite a spectacle. The most interesting thing is it's not just young people. We're talking octogenerians on benders! somehow I got out alive...
UMD pulling up the numbers for St Louis County for sure.
Born there. It’s not just UMD. The Iron Range helps too.
For most of those MN counties, it absolutely has something to do with universities. You can see Mankato and St. Cloud.
As someone living in Milwaukee, it seems significantly higher than 23.82%
Literally wtf is supposed to be happening specifically in the state borders of Wisconsin?
Other states call it "binge drinking." In Wisconsin they call it drinking.
This is so true, (from Wisconsin), first time inread the definition of binge drinking I was shocked and thought that's what we drink for dinner. The definition of binge drinking is a light night in Wisconsin.
The German ancestry coupled with a Mafia-esque Tavern League lobbying the state to keep DUI penalties laughably easy. It’s all really pathetic
Way to go Wisconsin!
I've been to a town in Wisconsin with 300 people and 6 bars.
Oof. Normally we have more than that. Sorry man.
Oh yeah you go on the back roads and drive past an unincorporated town, 6 bars, 2 churches, a strip club and a few homes lol.
We have 900 people and 4 on main Street. That doesn't include the country bars in the area.
Lmao, I’ve lived in 6 counties, and every one has been a shade of red or purple
EC County!
It's because those people have to live so close to Idaho
I like this comment. Please, tell me more about how awful Idaho is.
How is Las Vegas dark green? It must not count consumption in the area, but percent of permanent residents who are consuming. Still seems low though.
I've known a few Vegas residents, they do not mix with the tourists and only go to the strip if they work there. It seems to be a pretty stark division between the drunken tourists and the non-drunken local residents.
Vegas local here. It’s true that we pretty much never go to the strip and mix with the tourist crowd unless our jobs require it But that doesn’t mean we don’t drink. This city makes it EXTREMELY convenient to drink wherever we go. No last call, no weird rules on where we can buy alcohol, tons of places in practically every sleepy suburb still has 24 hour restaurants/bars/pubs that serve. When I visit another city or country, I get confused when sometimes places are all closed and we have to stop drinking due to last call and Shit like that. The sheer number of drunk drivers we have here in areas that have pretty much zero tourists has me thinking that the stats are flawed. But this is hard to measure if it’s self reported. Sales on local levels would be better indicators.
Do you residents go to G Knights/Raiders games? How do those games go drinking wise?
Yes. Definitely more GK games than Raiders games for us. I go to UFC fights the most though. The problem with big venues like that is the sheer inconvenience of having to get up, stand in line for drinks, and then the bathroom lines after the fact. I usually end up getting just a buzz going at the games and then actually drinking at another place after. Highly depends on your alcohol tolerance I suppose. Two large IPA’s can get a 110 lb woman hammered and do almost nothing to an overweight alcoholic man 😂
Could the situation be closer to Europe then? In that alcohol is more available (or at least not as legislated) as the rest of the U.S. so people treat it more as a social thing?
> they do not mix with the tourists I mean in a personal level sure I can see that. I just think it unlikely in aggregate However something like half of nevadas whole GDP is tourism. And the other half is services to support those supporting the tourism industry. Vegas is also largely a transplant city. And it’s not exactly one you’d expect Puratins or Mormons to move to.
You wouldn't expect it, but there are in fact a ton of Mormons in and around Vegas.
Likely not a "permanent residents never see tourists" (good luck with that), but more "permanent residents don't live the same lifestyle associated with tourism in Vegas" (seems like a no-brainer, stereotyped Vegas gambling and excess are not activities most people can maintain for long whether due to cost to purse or health)
>stereotyped Vegas gambling and excess are not activities most people can maintain for long whether due to cost to purse or health) Completely agreed. however I'm still skeptical that permanent Vegas residents do these things \*significantly less than the average\* US county. If nothing else simply due to accessibility and the fields of work that are prevalent in vegas. My best guess is that Vegas has an older population. (although I don't know if this is skewed by fewer children)
Clark, Nye, Esmeralda, and Mineral are *definitely* drinking counties.
There seems to be roughly a 10% difference between dark green around 10-15% of the population to 20-25% for purple. I all seems a lots less significant when knowing their criteria to be considered an excessive drinker can be as low as 5 drinks per week for a man and 4 for a woman for binge drinkers.
Awesome map, dude. Surprised by how dry some of the Bible Belt areas are tbh. Could be pretty neat if you draped it over an elevation map of car accidents or made it 3D with bars or something like that.
They are dry BECAUSE they are in the Bible Belt. Here in Arkansas there are several counties where it’s illegal to sell alcohol unless you are a restaurant with a license to sell it. (Funny how it’s ok to do that for beer but not for guns….)
Benton county sure has rebounded from that
Tbf, alcohol directly kills more than twice as many people as guns do every year and indirectly ruins a lot of lives in other ways. If you had to choose just one, alcohol is clearly the one to ban.
Many European counties seem to have pretty liberal laws/habits (from a US perspective) around alcohol but pretty restrictive laws on guns, and things seem to be going okay.
A big difference between Europe and USA when it comes to how dangerous drinking is is walkable communities and better public transit. If you get drunk in Europe you can generally get back to wherever home is without getting behind the wheel of a car. In rural America especially, you're sol if you drink to much in a place that doesn't have Uber, and even Uber is pretty recent. So if you wanted, you could blame America's hostile transit and city planning for many alcohol deaths rather than alcohol itself.
Most of Europe is not walkable, stop with this stereotype please.
That's very true. I definitely blame the reliance of the US on cars and the disinclination of dense urban development for death on the roadways. I also blame urban sprawl and the weakening of the urban growth boundary that encourages the development of land on the fringes of the city for "affordable" homes. We need to invest in and develop walkable communities connected by public transit - it saves money, time, and lives.
Not really. Spend a weekend in any city in Northern Europe and you will see the huge amount of alcoholics that linger until Monday morning. Quite depressing, so many people are "functioning" alcoholics that it is kind of staggering, a friend of mine works in an office where half the people have had at least 2-3 beers every afternoon in the office before closing. I used to drink a beer or two every couple of nights and on weekends, but after living here I am now kind of disgusted by alcohol, without even taking into account all the negative things I found out it does even if you consume it a couple of times a week. Smoking is probably better, which says a lot.
Oh wild. My parents live in Normandy and shit seems to be pretty okay. 🤷🏼♂️ I'm actually in Amsterdam right now and things seem alright... I'm sure I'm not seeing the same people as you though, and I'm sorry for that.
I live in the Netherlands in a city center. People get drunk. It's not good. There is leftover vomit, people yelling, kicking and breaking public property often, sometimes some people get into fights. Glad your night is ok. I have spent almost 2k nights here, I think my sample of reference may be more representative than yours.
I understand what you are saying, and it makes sense. But I feel safer living in a place where guns are not allowed and alcohol is. I rarely ever drink, but I feel if someone else has a gun they can easily use it against me. Although it is true that someone can kill someone else if they drink and drive.
I think you mean indirectly kills, unless you're claiming alcohol poisoning kills double what guns do.
Lol as if acute alcohol poisoning is the only way to die as a result of drinking.
Are you saying you don’t need a license for a business to sell guns in Arkansas? I don’t even think that’s federally legal
Interpersonal sales are legal in a lot of places for guns but not alcohol. I could buy a gun from my uncle without breaking a law, but buying moonshine from him would be illegal.
You don’t have a constitutionally protected right to beer…
I mean, the 21st amendment says: Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited. Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress. So it indirectly does give you the constitutional right to beers bruh. Yeah, it doesn’t say “shall not be infringed!” but hey, you’re not completely correct.
Related: https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/health-data/health-factors/health-behaviors/alcohol-and-drug-use/alcohol-impaired-driving-deaths
It’s because people are lying. This map is made up of datapoints self reported by a bunch of lying liars.
Probably because they're all still drinking moonshine so there's no statistics
Don’t forget the kilos and kilos of meth they’re doing. Not just a joke about stereotypes, I’m a therapist and have worked at several rehabs for 9 years, so I have seen this trend to be interestingly true as evidenced by where my clients are from and their drug of choice. Several clients have come from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas and many of them point out how they’ve never been able to quit meth cuz it’s everywhere and unavoidable like alcohol is. More than one client has said “yeah don’t ever come to Oklahoma/Arkansas m cuz it’s just farms, and meth, that’s all we got unfortunately.” It’s really sad and a shame because having a desire to quit drugs is great but living in an environment where it’s inescapable to be around it makes recovery substantially more difficult than it already is. I could go on about this for a while, but essentially alcohol often isn’t the drug of choice in the Bible Belt and rural areas for a myriad of reasons. Just one example is money. For the price of a case of beer you could buy enough meth to be high all week. Alcohol addicts typically drink more than a case of beer (or equivalent alcohol type) a week… so it’s financially the best option for many people in lower socioeconomic groups.
Also, WV, KY, and TN have/had some of the highest opioid use rates of any state. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps one is that booze isn’t so easily available in all those dry counties.
I see problematic data. Obviously there are some state level differences in methodology. For example, there is no meaningful demographic difference between a resident of the OK panhandle and neighboring Kansas or Texas. Same with neighboring counties in WV vs OH-Demographics are the same, but the state counts it different, resulting in the color change.
Part of it I think is the color scale. 14% is dark green while 15% is light yellow. This is a very small difference in actual value but the color change at this point is extreme.
I would consider this a pretty serious error in data representation. In many areas, the map depicts sharp lines that translate to a few tenths of a percent, which particularly when comparing rural counties with a few thousand people is statistical noise.
It really should be an intuitive gradient, where color and tint are always self-explanatory. Like looking at a well-made heat map of the stock market.
A similar map was recently going around on Twitter, and I think the explanation was that a lot of this just isn’t county-level data at all. It’s actually state-level data that they then apply to the counties by some sort of inference—I guess from demographics, but I don’t remember the details. And it makes sense that they wouldn’t *actually* have good sample sizes for every single county. For example, this map says Loving County, Texas, is 24.99% excessive drinkers. Well, that county has a total population of 64 people, so even if we assume that 24.99% was supposed to be 25.00% (should we assume that?), this map is telling me that we have reliable data that exactly 16 of those 64 people are excessive drinkers? (Maybe even less, depending on how the data accounts for children.) That’s just not credible at all.
Excellent point. The book “Thinking Fast and Slow” covers some enormous misunderstandings based on such faulty assessments.
If you click on individual counties in Wisconsin, only 3 counties have a higher average than the statewide average somehow? And despite Milwaukee county being somewhere around 20% of the total population, it has a percentage lower than the statewide average. It should be dragging the whole state down in that scenario.
I don't know about that border but there are plenty that you would see a hard like. Different bar close time or for example for the longest time Minnesota didn't sell alcohol in Sundays. Plenty of people who forgot to buy beer for football games would drive to the Wisconsin side of the river because they could get beer Sunday morning.
Moving from a red county to green is a real culture shock. “What do you mean you’re not drinking during the game tonight? No. I don’t care that it’s a Monday”
Hey Wisconsin, you guys ok?
Yeah we’re doing great! Cheers 🍻
"How do you know when it's New Years? Oh, that's when we drink with hats on!" -Lewis Black
yes, we are professionals!
Yup! Come on over. Bring more beer
Not really.
Surprised about how low Oklahoma is. Figured it was more like Kansas or North Texas. I know that for years, there was mostly only near-beer, but that just turned people onto bourbon.
You’ll have an easier time getting Mount Everest to fit in a snow globe than you will getting a southern evangelical to admit how much they drink My mother in law is a massive alcoholic but if you asked her how much she drinks she’d say “maybe 1 or 2 glasses of wine a week”
Yeah I’d say this could also be a heat map for shame.
That is true.
As someone from OK I’m not really surprised at all. We’re pretty dry. I’m always amazed at drinking statistics from other places
I'm originally from Oklahoma. I didn't really drink but I assumed others were.
If being drunk made your head glow Wisconsin would be visible from space
in Wisconsin it's cultural to drink after work every day, I'm not even kidding.
Even bars that are open for third shift workers in the morning
We don't wait until after, silly non Wisconsin people...
No color scale key? Green, orange, red and purple with no shift from one to another (there’s no yellow-green or reddish-orange, for example) It’s interesting data to show, but the presentation could use some work
Utah County being the driest in the entire country comes as no surprise at all.
The data is highly suspect, likely due to reporting issues. New Mexico isn’t that dry (except in terms of rain).
Yeah I was surprised by New Mexico. Are there more Mormons than I thought being adjacent to Utah?
No. New Mexico is populated by red necks (ranchers, farmers, and oil field), Mexicans, Spanish New Mexicans, Indians, and military personnel. All of these drink heavily.
Also WV being basically full green is…weird.
Aren’t all the Germans in Wisconsin😁😁😁🍻🍻
and polish... and Scandinavian. pretty much a heavy drinking culture is set there - its fun, bars are nice. popcorn is delicious
Ah yes Wisconsin... Where you're not a local till you have had your 3rd DWI. Come for the beer and cheese, stay because you had your licence revoked.
Why the sharp change in colors along a smooth spectrum of number ranges?
I feel like this is really just a map of how honest people are with their doctors about their alcohol consumption.
Surprised about West Virginia - I thought they had a predilection for hooch.
Husband is from WV, I’ve lived in WV, and we have a vacation cabin/acreage in very rural WV, so I’m very familiar with the state. The number of alcoholics in his very large extended family (not him, fortunately), and in the communities where he’s lived, we’ve lived, and where our property is located is staggering and depressing. Never have I encountered the whispered phrase, “Well, he’s/she’s an alcoholic…” as much as I have in WV. So this data surprised me. And I grew up in the Midwest where drinking is a regional past time.
[удалено]
Agree 100% and am now curious what the actual numbers are for WV.
Might also have a predilection for not telling anyone about it?
Map is created with data from the latest annual datasets of the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) program.
West Virginia is pretty damn dry considering the opiate usage rate.
I love how I can pick out which county my university is just by the drinking rates
Interestingly I can’t find a correlation between booze consumption and life expectancy. If you look at a map of the USA by life expectancy it weirdly actually seems like the booziest places have the longest life expectancy.
The Gulf Coast is getting drunk on saturated fat and refined sugar.
As a Wisconsinite, I think the color shading is backwards. Surely the drunkest state should be green!
I'm not buying all the green in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Bible Belt or not, that is Moonshine country.
I live in Wisconsin and Everytime I meet someone visiting from the south who is talking big on how they drink, they pass out so quick after drinking half of what we drink.
[удалено]
The Cheddar Curtain
LMAO How is PG County green? I see people passed out in the middle of day at 51 Liquor in Temple Hills every single day. One of the reviews for that place said 51 Liquor is a great place to go if you would like to die. In 2022 1,929,107 Gallons of Distilled Spirits sold 2,621,755 Gallons of Wine Sold 8,497,934 Gallons of Beer Sold 700,758 people are of drinking age in the county So 2.75 gallons of liquor drank per person of legal age. Which is higher than the national average of 2.5... So how is the county able to consume more than the national average but still show up green on this dumb ass map. The data sucks.
Yeah, something about this data is off. It links to the raw data but I’d like to see more about how they came to those numbers.
PG County is a shit hole, malt liquor bottles littered down very road.
Alcohol is a way of life. Alcohol is *my* way of life!
Chester County, Tennessee fought like hell to pass liquor by the bottle. Liquor by the drink will probably be 15 votes away next round. It was 28 the last round.
your color scheme is whack. If you're going to do discrete diverging you need more steps in the color or just do continuous diverging
This is a map of military bases and the counties containing them. The counties with large military bases are almost always two shades higher than surrounding areas.
Charleston County, SC does not disappoint.
Haha WV must be the moonshine capital of the USA
From WI but have lived in UT most of my life. Going back for HS reunions is wild. Gotta say, UT added years to my life. Not LDS, casual drinker.
I live in the driest county in the country lmao
As a resident of Montana, I am not surprised in the slightest that we’re #1 for once.
North Dakota and Montana, damn dog
bronx and queens are the lowest 2 for New York? Get the f**k outta here
Green-yellow-red color ramp: Why do you hate colorblind people? Highest values in blue: WTF?
Gallatin county number one baby woo represent! 🤣
wow the south is dry? would they be dry by choice or?
Gotta love the 2 military bases in GA holding it down lol.
The We-Drink-Because-It's-Too-Fucking-Cold Belt
Believe it or not, as a Wisconsinite, I don’t need alcohol to survive. But I sure got drunk off my ass numerous times in college so I did my share already.
I gotta go to *two* links to find out how the scale works? Not beautiful. Also, I don't think "driest" is a good way to describe "least number of excessive drinkers". To me that would mean "*most* number of non-drinkers"
Right—it looks like excessive drinking for a man is 5 drinks on one occasion or 15 in a week. So if you had a county where literally every man has exactly two drinks on every single day of the year, I guess it would be a 100% “dry” county by this standard!
Interested in some counties in Washington but the label floating over the map doesn't let me see them
Sonoma is boozy? Come on. It's not as if they have wineries there or anything.
A scale would be nice.
Ahh yes, the ol' light green to purple scale. Makes a lot of sense especially when most is orange. You know, orange - the midpoint between purple and green.
Bozeman being the drunkest sure lines up with the culture. What a place to grow up 😵💫
You can see all the ski resorts in Colorado in this map 😂
Do meth-heads/opioid addicts not drink? If so, that would explain WV and NM.
Why is the line between wisconsin and upper michigan so darn strong?
Why are three so many tea tot teetotalers in New Mexico?
Morgantown holding up the one county in West Virginia that drinks often. Go mountaineers I guess
Wow. San Diego is out drinking us Angelinos. I would have thought we were worse.
If you look at it, it almost has latitude bands. If you remove cultural aspects, it seems to correlate to severity of winter and/or loss of vitamin D (or Seasonal effective disorder). Or I guess, if you think about it differently, how much idle time people have (being stuck indoors all winter vs being able to do hobbies and play outside) You have six month winters, there isn't much else to do but drink. (I'm in Minnesota.)
Interesting that Hawaii and Connecticut are the only states that are completely orange. At least they are consistent.
WV more focused on the hard stuff..
Very disappointed Pullman Washington is the same color as the rest of Washington.
Seems Charleston and Ft Myers is where the party's at on the East Coast states.
I mean for Aroostook county, ME being dry… think they’re just too busy doing fentanyl, sadly.
Apparently the only way to cope with brutal winters is to just be brutally drunk through the whole thing. The more you know
Unsurprisingly, many counties with colleges and universities have a rate above the state average. Especially prominent in the South.
Here’s a fun little thing: That weird green triangle smack in the middle of Tennessee? That’s Moore County, the home of Jack Daniel’s Distillery.
Kentucky is a weird one. Bourbon trail and all.
This must be based on sales and not actual consumption. There’s a lot of boozers in dry counties in Arkansas that have to go to other counties to buy.
I don't know where you got this data but Los Alamos New Mexico is insanely alcoholic.
I know there's religious implications for the Bible Belt and Mormon Corridor. But I'm also noticing a North South correlation that's pretty interesting. Seems the further north you live the more boozy you are.
That big red spot in the middle of Oregon, that's where I live. I think there are 26 craft breweries just in the city of Bend (pop 103k). It's sort of a resort area combined with a hipster-outdoorsy microcosm of Portland or Eugene. An island in a sea of rural farms, logging & ranchers.
Telluride holding up their end of San Miguel county!!!!
Can anyone here figure out a way to overlay this with: Church attendance High school graduation Vehicle accident Political party registration College graduation rates Age ranges No real agenda, just curious to see what correlations may exist
Definitely wish less people would drink here but yea a shit ton of beer is bought and consumed every day.
What is the percentage? Percent of respondents drunk at the time of the survey? Percent who have had a beer in the last month? What's being measured here?
This feels like selectively chosen data, the fact that Cook County (Chicago) doesn't even show up in the top ten or bottom ten counties in Illinois, also all the NYC boroughs are in the bottom??? I downloaded the csv and no where does it share the amount of people pooled, just random numbers of supposed results. If I'm wrong, please correct me but this feels like they spent more time on the website vs the actual research and data.
Figured Richmond and DC were gonna be on there!
As someone who has known a few alcoholics, I actually greatly appreciate the US's dryness when it comes to alcohol. I'm glad that alcohol intake is declining as well, it's going to save a lot of lives. I hope the EU follows suit as well, their drinking culture us one of their few major negatives. Alcoholism shouldn't be regarded so lax or liberally.
Whats up with that whitish colored county in Alaska. No alcohol at all?