America's Booziest and Driest Counties
intoxistates.com
intoxistates.com
I grew up in a state where, for a few years, we had more former governors in jail than out of jail. I also lived in a state whose Democrats don't go by that name - oh no, they're the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party, for cripe's sake! Yet, Wisconsin has both Illinois and Minnesota beat with its enormously powerful and well-funded lobbying group of... bars?!
It's also a bit of a racket too from what I've heard. They are partnered up with advertising, marketing, music booking agencies, atm/gambling services, etc and you'll be left out of things if you're a bar and not a member.
They have way too much power.
I believe it.
Then DC and Virginia is different too, so it feels even weirder. There is enough cross state line traffic that people forget they are different states.
Not saying you are not right.
Fully 25% of the state is Baptist or Pentecostal, whereas OH is closer to 10%.
Wisconsin stands out at 25.29% of the population labeled as excessive drinkers due to the large amount of dark red, but South Dakota is at 22.43% -- less than 3% difference, but that state is mostly orange.
For a county example, Hardin, TX is 19.13% and Rusk, WI is 20.82%. A difference of just under 1.7%, but the Wisconsin county is bright red and the Texas county is orange.
I am also pretty sure we have the highest rate of fatal drinking + driving incidents. [1]
Our breweries also close at 8pm and you can get a maximum of three drinks. However, you can just go to the nearest bar / casino / liquor store (its the same place) and drink until 2am. Pretty backwards.
It's also insanely cost prohibitive to get just a beer + wine license in Bozeman. A full liquor license is almost a magnitude more expensive. I heard the local Texas Roadhouse paid 1.4 million for their full license.
[1] The scale of Montana is insane. Its about 1.5 times the size of England with 2% of the population. When were driving to the next town over it can be 45 minutes and you can happily pass cops cruising at 90. Mix this with alcohol and you have a lot of bad accidents.
Visually the map might be "pretty", but something's off, cultural aspects don't vary that much just because of an imaginary administrative line. But overall, if you squint a lot it's more of less right, northern states tend to booze a lot.
https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/index.html
For the alcohol consumption questions, they ask about the times people drank in the previous 30 days.
>You go to a 4th of July party and now you're an excessive drinker for the whole year?
This survey isn't used to morally judge populations, and the (very commonly used) summary statistics for heavy drinking don't mean every single respondents meeting those criteria is a heavy drinker. On a personal level, it depends on body mass, overall health, yadda yadda. But it's a good measure, because for the average man, 5 drinks in one day is definitely unhealthy. And, for everyone who gets swept up in that aggregate because St. Patrick's Day or the 4th of July was recent, there are people doing dry January or called in September. It averages out.
And, even if you argue all that, the data is still useful because it's relative to everyone else. Different definitions should yield roughly the same proportions of heavy drinkers between counties.
>cultural aspects don't vary that much just because of an imaginary administrative line
Those lines aren't arbitrary. They were usually drawn along physical barriers. Those barriers also sorted people into towns and heavily influenced how they intermingled in the past.
I work with county data, and stark differences between neighbors is very common across all data types. For instance, Philadelphia is abysmal for almost all health measures. But Chester county, just west of it, does amazingly. Why? Because Philadelphians have more pollution, lower average income, and a host of other problems. Chester is home to a lot of rich people who commute to Philadelphia.
Lumping together the guy who usually drinks a 6-pack on Fridays with the lady who puts away a fifth of vodka every single day makes no sense to me. There should be much more granularity.
I grew up in Southeastern Kentucky until I was about 10, in Pulaski county. It was a dry county at the time. I remember my mom's friends going on road trips for booze, and later on my mom told me that some people would vote for it to stay a dry county because they liked these road trips. I'm sure there were also people making money bringing in quantities and selling it under the table.
I also have a memory of a lake cop pulling over our boat on Lake Cumberland (huge tourist lake there) and making a quip about how much he hates finding weed on that lake... because it was always such bad weed. I remember it because of everyone laughing.
So yeah, don't believe that swath of green across Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Ask anyone else who has ever lived there. It's at least as yellow as Ohio and the other surrounding areas, probably with some patches of red.
Also check out Oklahoma. You're telling me the exact outline of Oklahoma is green but not the surrounding states?
Wisconsin though is 100% accurate.
Except we’re both just offering anecdotes. Excessive drinkers are more conspicuous to begin with, and nobody is telling stories about the overwhelming majority of people who don’t drink excessively like “and then my mom didn’t drink again.” (Unless of course she’s a recovering alcoholic).
This is a strange definition of "driest". I'd have thought driest simply meant lowest mean alcohol consumption.
In the UK (and probably most of Europe) that's what we have with a social lunch.
It's really not normal to drink that much over lunch in Europe. Maybe at a party.
American drinking culture is rather different. I recall American work colleagues visiting us being horrified at going out for a lunchtime pint. ("What if your manager or HR finds out"; "Errm, we're joining them, they are already there"). They never even got to see the Friday night carnage that goes on in most British pubs.
The WHO data suggests that Americans drink about 4ml less alcohol a day than Brits.
Looking at the UK guidelines, a bottle of wine is generally ten units and they suggest under fourteen units a week spread out over three or more days. So that "social lunch" seems to be binge drinking in the UK too.
And I don't do it every day because I am old and hangovers are now a multi-day affair. In my younger days I could have easily done Friday, Saturday and possibly Sunday.
I drink a lot and I'd never do something like that. You'd be too drunk to drive.
Social lunch != working lunch
Though a pint or two or sharing a bottle of wine (not one each) at a working lunch is hardly unusual in Blighty.
> You'd be too drunk to drive.
One doesn't need to drive into London nor most commuter cities.
I wonder what sorting algorithm they're using, or if the list was just manually sorted and those states are out of order due to a copy-paste error.
More seriously, the fact that Wisconsin is clearly visible, down to the exact state border, is remarkable.