Today, around 8,200 or so Americans will turn 21. Which means, of course, they will become eligible to engage in that time-honored habit of adulthood: drinking alcohol. (I’m sure absolutely none of them did so before they turned 21. I certainly did not, or at least, would not admit to doing so in this piece, which I know my parents read.)
The decline of drinking, explained in one chart
Science says that even moderate drinking is bad for you — and Americans are listening.
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Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.
Yet those who get the chance to legally order a beer or a wine or, God help them, a Long Island iced tea, may find the bar a little less crowded these days. According to a new survey released by Gallup this week, just 54 percent of Americans now say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest share since Gallup began tracking the question way back in 1939, six years after Prohibition was repealed.
Even Americans who do continue to drink say they are drinking less, and say they’re increasingly concerned about the health impacts of alcohol. A narrow majority of Americans say that even moderate drinking is unhealthy, while reported drinking frequency also hit record lows.
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