> If you don’t distinguish binge drinking from daily moderate drinking, that would be due to Americans’ addiction-phobia, which causes them to interpret any daily drinking as addictive.<p>This is a quite common attitude in northern Europe as well, or at least in the Nordic countries. In Denmark it's highly suspicious to drink alcohol on a weekday (<i>especially</i> at lunch), unless it's a holiday, and will lead people to worry about alcoholism. But it's completely normal to have 6+ drinks on a weekend evening. Maybe even <i>every</i> weekend evening. You can binge-drink as much as you want, as long as it's only Fri-Sat (sometimes Thu). In fact it's even sort of expected; <i>not</i> doing so might raise suspicions that you're some kind of weird religious person (Mormon? Muslim?). Not sure how this arose, but it seems to be the cultural norm: 14 drinks/wk spread out as 1 each with lunch/dinner every day is seen as alcoholic, but the same 14 drinks/wk spread out as 7 each on Fri/Sat evenings is culturally normal. Whereas in southern Europe the opposite is more often true, at least traditionally, with weekend binge-drinking seen as more questionable than moderate daily drinking.