I am suspicious that reporting methods/thresholds may vary by state. The lines follow political boundaries too closely. When you see a very dry county next to a boozy one despite both being in the same metro area and with broadly similar populations it is hard to believe the data is accurate. Growing up in West Virginia I also don't think it is especially dry compared to neighboring Virginia or Ohio.
The color scale on this map distorts one's perception of where there are significant differences. There are sharp color boundaries at arbitrary points on a color scale and counter-intuitive gradations of color (while greens reflect the driest counties, the darkest green is actually the least dry of the greens). With a more continuous color scale this map would seem a lot less dramatic.
The metric they use for "excessive drinkers" is pretty inflexible. It, for instance, does not take into account weight whatsoever. I can drink the entire "excessive binge drinker" amount (5 beers) in 1 sitting and I wouldn't even be legally drunk. Also the time window is not given anywhere. If I get not-quite-drunk once, am I suddenly an "excessive drinker" for life?
Interesting to see Gallatin County (Bozeman, MT) being #1<p>I am also pretty sure we have the highest rate of fatal drinking + driving incidents. [1]<p>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.<p>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.<p>[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.
I don't have solid evidence to discredit the map/data and I also don't fully understand the CDC rating connected to this map, for ex. 5 or more drinks on a single occasion. OK and how many occasions? You go to a 4th of July party and now you're an excessive drinker for the whole year?<p>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.
I don't believe the Bible Belt for one second.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Also check out Oklahoma. You're telling me the exact outline of Oklahoma is green but not the surrounding states?<p>Wisconsin though is 100% accurate.
> Driest: % of people in , are excessive drinkers<p>This is a strange definition of "driest". I'd have thought driest simply meant lowest mean alcohol consumption.
Based on American definitions of binge drinking, one bottle of wine is a "binge".<p>In the UK (and probably most of Europe) that's what we have with a social lunch.
Fascinating to see that this particular pattern in the south is another phenomenon influenced by ancient geology: <a href="https://geospatial.com/the-blue-swoosh-and-the-black-belt-at-the-cross-section-of-geology-and-human-geography/" rel="nofollow">https://geospatial.com/the-blue-swoosh-and-the-black-belt-at...</a>
I don't understand the sorting on the "Top 10s per state" list. Maryland through Missouri are inexplicably sandwiched between Oregon and Pennsylvania.<p>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.
NYC is interesting in that Manhattan is red (boozers), Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island are green (dry), and Brooklyn is yellow (average). Manhattan makes sense I guess since people go to bars and restaurants often but not sure on the divergence from the other places. Immigrints?
Thompkins county in NY is the red area in the bottom middle. This is where Cornell is (Ithaca, NY), so has a lot of college students and a lot of bars.