New Study Shows ‘Sobering’ Truth on Capital Region Binge-Drinking

The vast majority of us have had a night, or two, where we've had too much to drink. Sometimes, it just sneaks up on us.

That being said, when those "one or two nights" turn into a regular occurrence, that's where trouble may begin to brew. Binge-drinking and excessive drinking is a real problem across the United States, including the state of New York, and the Capital Region.

An online health database crunched the numbers on binge-drinking across the United States, and some of the data is...well, sobering.

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The database in question is Country Health Rankings and Roadmaps, also known by their URL, CountryHealthRankings.com. In this instance, the website cobbled together data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and generated percentages of adults who reported binge-drinking or excessive drinking within the last 30 days of the survey.

This data has been broken down by state, and by county, allowing us to see the percentage of people in the Capital Region who reported this had happened. The data used in this study was from 2018, according to the source.

Before we dive into the Capital District numbers, a few notes on the study as a whole. As a state, New York had 19% of its residents who were surveyed report that had binge-drank or drank excessively in the last 30 days. The range of responses to the survey was 16-25%, and unfortunately, a Capital Region county tied for the highest percentage in the state.

Comparatively speaking, Massachusetts averaged 24% in their responses, Connecticut averaged 20% and New Jersey averaged 16%.

With all of that being said, let's break it down by Capital Region county, and explore what percentage of the population was engaging in binge-drinking and excessive drinking before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down.