It just seems odd that in the UK, binge drinking is considered to be an issue, and yet a significant percentage of the US population is drinking the equivalent of a night out on a daily basis.
It's really, really prevalent in some industries. I've hired concrete finishers before (multiple times), and I've never NOT had a bunch of empty cans crushed up and hidden somewhere random on the worksite afterwords, even if it's only for a couple hours. When I worked with some writers years ago, they kept bottles of cheap scotch and 2 buck chuck in their desks, and had to replenish them regularly.
The go to drug selection in tech skews our perception a bit (weed being incredibly pervasive, but lsd,shrooms,stimulatns far from absent).
I've since cut back a lot but in my worst post-college days I could drink the equivalent of 8-10 drinks in a night and feel perfectly fine the next morning as long as I got a decent amount of sleep.
I think the conclusion to draw here is not that having 4-5 drinks a day is no big deal, but that different people react to alcohol and other drugs differently. For some people, like me, it turns out to be no big deal. For others I'm pretty sure it would be a very big deal. A one-size-fits-all drug policy is never going to work.
The bulk of my customers drink 5-7 nights per week. We call them "regulars." They come every night when their shift ends, and most of them stay until close (although they are primarily service industry, so this is 5-7 hours per day). If they have a day off, they often show up earlier.
For these people, I think that one drink every half hour is an understatement. They're having a beer/cocktail every half hour or so, and mixing in shots, jello shots, etc. If they have limited time, they will up their rate of consumption. They're after a specific result.
I have no idea what percentage of the population they represent.
We have a lot of other customers who we see maybe once a week, every other week. Some folks come in to eat our food special and just have a couple beers and go. Stuff like that.
I think that you are probably in the latter group (or the non-drinking group) and so you don't see the former group. I very much agree that the heavy drinkers are not living normal lives; they ARE in fact permanently hungover (or should be--they learn to deal with it in various ways). It's a continuing problem with my own staff, actually.
Anyway, they're out there, they're holding jobs and making children, and they undeniably have a problem with alcohol. But again, I have no idea what percentage of the population they make up. Maybe I'm seeing the worst of the problems--but I don't actually believe that.
the-east-end.co.uk/the-gin-craze