Six Gallons of Gin

This has nothing to do with the kids - not yet anyway. I was captivated by a review about a new book describing life in London during the mid-eighteenth century. It got my attention right away by opening with a line about Londoners brazenly urinating in the streets in the 1760's which got me thinking about modern day Hyderabad. Towards the end it mentioned that people consumed an average of six gallons of gin a year. That felt like a lot.

Later I pulled up the wikipedia entry on alcohol consumption per capita by country and it was illuminating. This is based on a WHO study. The unit of measure is equivalent liters of pure ethyl alcohol (so it would take 10 bottles of a liter each of 10% alcohol to make one equivalent liter of ethyl alcohol).Moldova is in first place. I had to google Moldova. It's a tiny land-locked country south of Ukraine. It's the poorest country in Europe. They drink more than double of what Americans do. Next, except for Andorra (#7), you've got to go to the 13th place to find the first non-eastern-European country on the list. Guess who that is? South Korea. Then you have to go to the twenty seventh place to find the next non-European nation. Nigeria. Canada comes in at 48, right after Rwanda. The US is at 57. Even the Nepalese drink more than us. At the bottom of the list are Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Moldovans drink over 18 liters of pure alcohol. That's over 240 of our 750 ml sized wine bottles of 10% alcohol drunk by every adult over 15 years of age in a year. At #57, we Americans would have to consume over 125 of those bottles of wine. I don't consider myself a slouch, but someone's pulling most of my weight. And the six gallons of gin? That's about 13 liters of pure alcohol - about equal to the total consumption of all types of spirits per capita in the United Kingdom today. Here's another morbid statistic - 2.5 million deaths each year are related to drinking alcohol. Almost seven thousand people are going to die between now and tomorrow this time due to alcohol. That's more that twice the number of people killed on 9/11 - every day.