Just how bad is America's drinking problem?

But my inner pessimist sees alcohol use continuing in its pandemic vein, more about coping than conviviality. Not all social drinking is good, of course; maybe some of it should wane, too (for example, some employers have recently banned alcohol from work events because of concerns about its role in unwanted sexual advances and worse). And yet, if we use alcohol more and more as a private drug, we’ll enjoy fewer of its social benefits, and get a bigger helping of its harms. Let’s contemplate those harms for a minute. My doctor’s nagging notwithstanding, there is a big, big difference between the kind of drinking that will give you cirrhosis and the kind that a great majority of Americans do. According to an analysis in The Washington Post some years back, to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you needed to drink more than two bottles of wine every night. People in the next decile consumed, on average, 15 drinks a week, and in the one below that, six drinks a week. The first category of drinking is, stating the obvious, very bad for your health. But for people in the third category or edging toward the second, like me, the calculation is more complicated. Physical and mental health are inextricably linked, as is made vivid by the overwhelming quantity of research showing how devastating isolation is to longevity. Stunningly, the health toll of social disconnection is estimated to be equivalent to the toll of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. To be clear, people who don’t want to drink should not drink. There are many wonderful, alcohol-free means of bonding. Drinking, as Edward Slingerland notes, is merely a convenient shortcut to that end. Still, throughout human history, this shortcut has provided a nontrivial social and psychological service. At a moment when friendships seem more attenuated than ever, and loneliness is rampant, maybe it can do so again. For those of us who do want to take the shortcut, Slingerland has some reasonable guidance: Drink only in public, with other people, over a meal—or at least, he says, “under the watchful eye of your local pub’s barkeep.”