Do Americans Drink Too Much?
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Writing in this month’s Atlantic, Kate Julian offers a long, comprehensive piece on alcohol consumption in the US. As a history of drinking in America, it’s excellent. Perhaps the magazine didn’t think a mere history was enough to move copies, though. Someone slapped a provocative title on the article—“America Has a Drinking Problem”—and teased it with this blurb:
A little alcohol can boost creativity and strengthen social ties. But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today.
Writers don’t usually compose headlines or blurbs, and often titles are meant to induce readers to look rather than reflect a careful summary of what they’ll find. I have used provocative titles myself to induce clicking-through. Yet this is a really misleading frame for the piece, which instead explores American drinking history, why we drink, how soon we started (Göbekli Tepe!), the social, communal, and spiritual aspects, and the consequences of drinking alone or out of stress. The upshot is a nuanced one, in which different groups have at different times used alcohol more or less healthfully. It doesn’t deliver on the title, though—largely because Americans aren’t drinking a lot by historical standards.
Julian does gamely try to offer some support for these teasers, though, beginning with our changed behavior during Covid. She notes how the pandemic shifted our habit of healthier, social drinking to a less healthy form of isolated and depressed drinking. That worries her, and she uses the way many self-medicated during the crisis as a launching pad for other concerns.
Three years ago, I posted a related article exploring what seemed at the time like a drop in drinking: What if We Just Stop Drinking? Compare and contrast.
What she can’t offer in her 10,000 words is much evidence that drinking is becoming a problem. Consumption bounces around a lot, and while it may have ticked up marginally in recent years, it’s way below its recent peak. As Boomers entered their drinking years, they drove up national consumption to its highest level since Prohibition. During the 1990s, consumption dipped and since the turn of the century rebounded only a bit.
Yet here’s how she characterizes these trends:
Right now we are lurching into another of our periodic crises over drinking.... Since the turn of the millennium, alcohol consumption has risen steadily, in a reversal of its long decline throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
Before the pandemic, some aspects of this shift seemed sort of fun, as long as you didn’t think about them too hard. In the 20th century, you might have been able to buy wine at the supermarket, but you couldn’t drink it in the supermarket. Now some grocery stores have wine bars, beer on tap, signs inviting you to “shop ’n’ sip,” and carts with cup holders.
Actual bars have decreased in number, but drinking is acceptable in all sorts of other places it didn’t used to be: Salons and boutiques dole out cheap cava in plastic cups. Movie theaters serve alcohol, Starbucks serves alcohol, zoos serve alcohol. Moms carry coffee mugs that say things like This Might Be Wine, though for discreet day-drinking, the better move may be one of the new hard seltzers, a watered-down malt liquor dressed up—for precisely this purpose—as a natural soda.
Well, sure, alcohol is available more broadly than it was forty years ago and more, when the US still harbored Puritanical ideas about the dangers of drink. Julian’s anecdotes don’t amount to data, though. Per capita consumption rose sharply after Prohibition, leveling off for a decade before ballooning in the 1970s and ‘80s, when Americans drank more than 2.5 gallons of ethanol a year. It dropped to around 2.2 gallons at the turn of the century and has slowly ticked up to about 2.4 gallons, where it’s remained for a decade—roughly in line with historical trends.
Julian does note, accurately, that alcohol-related deaths are way up in the new century—a confusing statistic researchers have a hard time explaining. (Julian doesn’t try.) The statistic includes any death in which alcohol was a factor, but may include other drugs as well, so even this could be an artifact of data-collection and the impact of opioid deaths. But it’s also true that teenage consumption is way down over the same period—miraculously so, in fact. Consumption among men hasn’t risen, but women are drinking a bit more (though still far less than men). Indeed, the rise in women’s consumption may account for the slight 21st century uptick.
It’s also important to emphasize that the vast majority of Americans don’t abuse alcohol. A widely-publicized study from 2015 found that 84% of Americans (and 90% of women) averaged one drink a day or less. Only 8% of Americans consume more than two drinks a day, and this slice contains the problem drinkers—half of whom consume more than four drinks a day. This pattern of distribution is totally common: a small group of drinkers accounts for most of any population’s alcohol consumption. Alcoholism is a dangerous disease, and no one should try to downplay its horrors. But neither should we attribute this behavior to a larger group.
Anybody making, selling, or writing about alcohol needs to be very clear about its substantial dangers. I am especially troubled by the rise in alcohol-related deaths and hope researchers are trying to figure out what’s happening there. It’s worth watching changing consumption habits, and keeping an eye on whether and how we encourage binge and problem drinking. Since alcohol is a social beverage, consumption is tied to healthy or unhealthy cultural habits—and that’s good news since we have control over our group behavior.
On the other hand, there’s very little evidence, even in Julian’s own article, to support the lurid claims made in the title. The dull reality is that consumption has risen very slowly as women start to drink more, but is otherwise flat. There’s no crisis, and if America has a drinking problem, it’s the same one we’ve had for 50 years. But that may not be enough of a reason for most readers to click through on an otherwise quite interesting article. Do click through, though—just expect a more nuanced take.