From the Daily Mail:
By every quantitative measure, women are drinking more. They’re being charged more often with drunk driving, they’re more frequently measured with high concentrations of alcohol in their bloodstreams at the scene of car accidents, and they’re more often treated in emergency rooms for being dangerously intoxicated. In the past decade, record numbers of women have sought treatment for alcohol abuse. And, in perhaps the most undeniable statistic of all, they are the consumers whose purchases are fueling steady growth in the sales of wine. Meanwhile, men’s drinking, arrests for drunk driving, and alcohol purchases are flat, or even falling.
A national analysis of hospitalizations for alcohol overdose found that the rate of young females age eighteen to twenty-four jumped 50 percent between 1999 and 2008. In the same period, the rate for young men rose only 8 percent. The most alarming statistic was the sharp rise in the number of young women who turned up at hospitals having OD’d on both drugs and alcohol: That number more than doubled. Among young men, it stayed the same.
Usually, you'd want to commend girls for catching up with the guys, because, really, if there was anything Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for, it was the right to go toe-to-toe with men in taking down Jager Bombs on a Thursday night. But literally none of the statistics above—down to the increased consumption of the lamest of all alcoholic beverages, wine—are what you would call… good. Increased drunk driving, increased emergency room visits, increased treatment for alcohol abuse: These are not positive drinking habits. And you were always the ones who looked our blacked-out states in horror.
[H/T: Daily Mail; The love of my life drinking wine image via Shutterstock]
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