Kaila White

The Republic | azcentral.com

Blame it on the altitude.

The "drunkest city" in Arizona is Flagstaff, according to a website list released Thursday.

Granted, that website is 24/7 Wall St., a financial news and opinion company that regularly releases lists ranking cities on various topics. For example, earlier this year it named Tucson America's 37th worst city to live in.

The Flagstaff metro area earned its title because "19.2 percent of adults report unhealthy drinking habits, the highest share of any metro area in Arizona," according to data from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, which defines excessive drinking as:

"The percentage of adults that report either binge drinking, defined as consuming more than 4 (women) or 5 (men) alcoholic beverages on a single occasion in the past 30 days, or heavy drinking, defined as drinking more than one (women) or 2 (men) drinks per day on average."

That compares with 18 percent of adults reporting excessive drinking nationwide, and 16.6 percent of Arizonans as a whole, according to the site.

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Although the title is based only on levels of binge and heavy drinking in metro areas, 24/7 Wall St. dug in on Flagstaff beyond the criteria.

"Unhealthy behavior in the metro area does not stop with alcohol. Roughly one in five area adults identify as smokers, a larger rate than both the national and state smoking rates of 17 percent and 16.5 percent respectively," they wrote.

For what it's worth, although it's probably bogus that altitude scientifically makes you drunker, it is possible that you feel drunker because of altitude sickness.