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Americans drank more during the pandemic — and they did it in riskier ways

Americans responded to the stress of the pandemic by drinking more — a lot more for some — and there's a risk that those habits could stick.

Why it matters: Excessive drinking is connected to a variety of health and social ills, butthe growing ubiquity of alcohol in daily life can make cutting back harder than ever.


By the numbers: Americans started drinking more as soon as the pandemic began in full last year — data from Nielsen showed a 54% increase in national alcohol sales year-on-year in the week ending on March 21, 2020. And as the pandemic wore on, so did Americans' drinking.

Between the lines: It shouldn't be a surprise that many Americans responded to the stress of the pandemic by turning to the bottle — similar spikes were seen following traumatic events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. But pandemic tippling occurred against the backdrop of years of growing alcohol consumption and pushed some people toward the particularly destructive habit of solitary drinking.

  • After more than a decade of declining alcohol consumption, per-capita alcohol consumption increased by 8% between 1999 and 2017 and the number of alcohol-related deaths per yeardoubled to nearly 70,000.
  • Over the same years, alcohol seeped its way out of bars, restaurants and homes and into once-dry areas of daily life, with movie theaters, coffee shops and supermarkets selling alcohol and/or allowing consumption on site, while the rise of products like spiked seltzers and alcopops widened the market for booze.
  • Sales of liquor rose during the pandemic as well, which is especially worrying as distilled spirits are much easier to abuse than lower-alcohol beer or wine.
  • The unusually solitary nature of pandemic drinking was especially risky, as the writer Kate Julian described in a piece for the Atlantic last month, noting that "solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink."

Of note: While the pandemic was a global stressor, drinking more was mostly an American response — a recent survey found Europeans, with the exception of the British, drank less in the first months of the pandemic.

Flashback: We still have a long way to match the tippling habits of our forebearers — Julian noted the average American adult in 1830 drank three times as much as we do now, much of it whiskey that was often cheaper than milk.

What's next: It's too early to know how the return to in-person socializing will affect drinking trends, though a number of states have moved to extend more liberal pandemic-era alcohol regulations like allowing bars to sell to-go cocktails.

  • The historical American pattern has been to binge — often during periods of social stress and dislocation, like the Industrial Revolution — and then abstain, which means we could be in for a turn away from the hard stuff.

The bottom line: Alcohol is a drug, and an increasingly legal and available one that is the third-leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. And thanks to the pandemic, Americans are drinking more and they're drinking worse.

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Bipartisan group of senators urges Blinken to vaccinate Americans abroad

Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) are leading an effort urging the Biden administration to coordinate with the Defense Department to donate supplemental COVID-19 vaccine doses to U.S. embassies and consulates.

Why it matters: Millions of Americans living in countries where they are not considered eligible for the vaccine or those living in places where vaccines are not being authorized by the FDA or the World Health Organization may have to wait for months or even years to receive a vaccine.

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