× Close Drunks in the US: % of adults age 26+ who binge drank in previous month

This map shows the percentage of US adults age 26 and older who reported binge drinking in the previous month.

Binge alcohol use is defined as drinking five or more drinks on the same occasion on at least one day in the past 30 days.

The 50 states and the District of Columbia were ranked by Bloomberg based on results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health collected from approximately 67,500 individuals in the US in 2011 and 2012. The survey was sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The District of Columbia (zoom in with mouse click) leads the pack with 30.1%. To be fair it would make more sense to compare it to other cities and not states. It is followed by North Dakota (27.96%) and Rhode Island (27.94) on 2nd and 3rd places.

The state with the lowest number of people who binge drank is Utah with 15.65% followed by North Carolina (17%) and Tennessee (17.21%), where people seem to enjoy their Whiskey in moderation. Keep in mind though, that these numbers are based on what people reported in surveys.

Using the Map

You can see the data value for an individual geographic unit (e .g. country, state, county) by moving the mouse over it.

You can zoom in by clicking on a unit and zoom out by clicking on the same unit or any point on the map outside of units.

Click on the button in the top menu to see the IPython notebook with the code to retrieve and process the data.

Click on the button in the top menu to see the data table used for the maps.

Click on the button to download the currently displayed map as a PNG image.

If you see in the top menu you can choose a color scheme from the drop down displayed on click.

If there is a menu item named Choose Dataset on the left in the top menu, you can choose different data series to display on the map from that drop down.

Credits

This map is created using the d3.geomap JavaScript library.

Published August 03, 2014 • Data Source • CC BY-SA 2014 Ramiro Gómez (@yaph)

