letustrythis123

The average American drinks 9 liters of booze a year. That seems way too low, even for my moderate/light drinking friends who might put that away in a weekend.

If the liter bottle is the 750ml one, that means I was drinking anywhere from 100 to 150 liters a year. Wow. I'm shocked I am still here.

CAPTAINZING2000

Where did they derive the numbers from? Was this taken in account there are 315 million or so here in the U.S. No giving into account half of those might not even be legal drinking age. Also hard for us drunks to believe, some people just don't want to put a toxic substance in their bodies.
Can you provide a link or say where this was from?

Quick joke
Were you aware 9 out of 10men suffer from erectile dysfunction?
Does this mean 1 out of 10 enjoys it?
Sorry that was tasteless

ScottFromWI

I drink exactly 0 liters of alcohol a year now..that's the only statistic that matters to me!

letustrythis123

lol. here you go:
Russian men killed by vodka: The shocking death toll.

CAPTAINZING2000

If I lived in Russia I'd be still drinking sigh.

EverySngleNight

Did a Russian man do the math? ;-) <---THAT was tasteless! Captain's joke was funny. LOL

caboblanco

a more accurate number would be derived from finding the total amount of liquor sold in a year...but even that would have flaws

Nevertheless

You can usually find a statistic that tells you anything you want to hear if you look hard enough. I bet with a little more googling I could find one that says we drink LESS than 9 liters.
This one says Americans average 20.8 gallons of beer. Thats about 79 liters.
How Much Beer Do Americans Drink Per Year? - Ask.com
I'm with ScottFromWI . I don't drink any. Thats the only statistic that matters to me.

soberhawk

USA is estimated to 9.4 liter of pure alcohol, that is a little more more than 9.4 liters of booze.

freshstart57

750 ml is not a liter. A liter is 1000 ml. That's what the m in ml means, there's a thousand of the little buggers. The metric system: it's easy n it's fun!

The statistic you quoted refers to liters of pure alcohol, so if you are talking a conversion to say, vodka at 80 proof, that would be 22 liters, or about thirty 26 oz bottles of booze.

wolfpackfan45

I'm not an alcoholic, but my son is. I drink at MOST about 10 alcoholic drinks a year. Usually on holidays or vacations while dining. Most of my friends are the same. It's just not a big part of our lives.

PurpleKnight

Is that total population divided by litres??

I guess that's probably not too far off, if we're counting in all those that don't drink any!!

miamifella

Before I became an addict I had maybe one or two glasses of wine or beer per week when I did drink. And many weeks I did not drink anything. This statistic does not seem unbelievable to me.

FeelingGreat

Is there a big demographic that doesn't drink at all? I'm thinking that a much larger proportion of the US population are active church goers than many other western countries. Maybe this group is drinking much less than the average, if at all? Or maybe I'm way off beam.

freshstart57

There are way more teetotallers that you might imagine. It is reported that 30% of Americans do not drink at all. Ever. Abstainers.

And worldwide, almost half of all men and two-thirds of all women do not consume alcohol.

Eddiebuckle

9.4 liters of 100% alcohol is about 31.3 750 ml bottles of 80 proof booze per year assuming you convert all alcohol consumption (beer, wine, liquor) to its equivalent in grain alcohol.

Assuming 1.5 oz booze per drink, this is about 1.45 drinks per day on average. The stats I saw (on wiki) were for the population 15 and older. It's higher than I would have thought. But then again, at the end of my drinking career, I was knocking back 1.75 litre bottles every other day... about 20 drinks a day.

If you assume that 5% of the population drinks like I did, and 95% drink the rest of the booze, the per capita consumption for the "bottom 95" is more like 3.7 drinks a week or 3.4 liters of 200 proof alcohol per year.

Eddiebuckle

If the overall average is 1.5 drinks a day, with 5% drinking 20 and 30% drinking 0 drinks per day, the middle 65% would average 5.4 drinks a week.

littlefish

Statistics are one of those things that leave me with more questions than answers. Taking a general survey and classifying ALL people who drink does not make the distinction between alcoholics and normal drinkers. For me that kind of statistic loses it's meaning because I know that for every normal drinker who might sip a single glass of whiskey over a period of hours on New Years Eve, there were people like me messing up the statistics drinking 5 times that much that night and the rest of the 364 days of the year!
How can they make a statistic like that sensible when they don't differentiate between the alcoholic drinker and the normal drinker?

We will never know what the normal people are drinking or how much as long as the over-consuming alcoholics are placed in the same study.

karate

I would think Non -drunks would consume that much .

The majority of alcohol is consumed by a small minority

freshstart57

Interesting point there, littlefish. I have no idea how some survey can tell the alcoholic from the moderate drinker when we ourselves, by and large, cannot do it either. How many of us have sworn off and then decided that glass of whiskey would be ok because we are pretty dang sure that we can drink 'normally?

One thing we can take from these numbers is that the proportion of us who drink that 'normally' is smaller than we think.