Day drinking, bottomless brunch cocktails, booze cruises, tailgating, pre-gaming: A lot of Americans are having more to drink than just an evening cocktail or a glass of wine with dinner. Binge drinking is a problem across the United States, but in some cities across the country statistics show people indulging in greater numbers and one state has the highest concentration of drunkest cities in America.
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On average, 18 percent of adults in the U.S. drink excessively, either by binge drinking (four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men during a single sitting) or drinking heavily (15 plus drinks for men and eight plus drinks for women per week).
24/7 Wall Street looked at the data on the percentage of adults who self report binge or heavy drinking from 381 metro areas as collected in the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a joint program from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Interestingly, 12 of the top 20 cities with the highest rate of drinking are in one state, Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services 2016 report on alcohol use in the state notes that per capita alcohol consumption rate in Wisconsin is 1.3 times higher than the national rate and Wisconsin's rate of adult binge drinking (22 percent) is the third highest in the country.
The rankings included the percent of deaths attributed to alcohol (such as drunk driving crashes or liver cirrhosis) and potential lives lost per 100,000 people due to premature death annually. They also considered median household income and poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, as well as the number of bars per capita as given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Not surprisingly, many of the cities that rank high for excessive drinking also rank high for drunk driving fatalities. Nationwide, the percentage of death from alcohol-related car accidents is 31 percent. But in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a city that falls in third place on this list, has the seventh highest number of alcohol-related driving deaths in America (47.5 percent).
An interesting correlation is the connection between poverty and alcohol consumption. The list of 20 driest cities in the country include several metro areas than have a greater poverty rate than the national average. It should also be noted that many of the cities on the list also still have some kind of "blue law" prohibiting the sale of packaged alcohol on Sundays, and that more than a few of these metro areas are in Utah, where the concentrated Mormon population drives the low drinking rates. Below is the list of 20 driest and drunkest cities in America. You can read the full report here.
20 Drunkest Cities in America
- Appleton, Wisconsin
- Oshkosh-Neenah, Wisconsin
- Green Bay, Wisconsin
- Madison, Wisconsin
- Fargo, North Dakota
- La Crosse-Onalaska, Wisconsin
- Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
- Ames, Iowa
- Eau Claire, Wisconsin
- Mankato-North Mankato, Minnesota
- Wausau, Wisconsin
- Sheboygan, Wisconsin
- Missoula, Montana
- Grand Forks, North Dakota
- Racine, Wisconsin
- Janesville-Beloit, Wisconsin
- Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wisconsin
- Lincoln, Nebraska
- Iowa City, Iowa
- Corvallis, Oregon
20 Driest Cities in America
- Provo-Orem, Utah
- St. George, Utah
- Beckley, West Virginia
- Logan, Utah-Idaho
- Ogden-Clearfield, Utah
- Parkersburg-Vienna, West Virginia
- Morristown, Tennessee
- Jackson, Tennessee
- Johnson City, Tennessee
- Charleston, West Virginia
- Owensboro, Kentucky
- Memphis, Tennessee
- Cleveland, Tennessee
- Huntington-Ashland, West Virginia-Kentucky-Ohio
- Knoxville, Tennessee
- Rocky Mount, North Carolina
- Farmington, New Mexico
- Kingsport-Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia
- Gadsden, Alabama
- Anniston-Oxford-Jacksonville, Alabama
