I'm not convinced. Here in the UK the poor are regularly hauled over the coals for buying cheap booze in supermarkets. Much of my family up north while having a comparable lifestyle earn less than my family down south and both sides drink just as often.

The big difference seems to be the cost of the alcohol. My southern family drink cognac, wine and top shelf spirits. My Northern family drink special offer standard lager like Carling, cider like Magners and rarely drink wine or the occasional more common spirits. I'm fairly certain the southern part of my family spends much more on the north, but they drink roughly around the same.

I'm not sure intelligence has too much to do with it, I guess it depends on whether you're tracking consumption vs spending.

    The word alcohol – al kohl – is Arabic in origin, like many other words that begin with “al,” like algebra, algorithm, alchemy, and Al Gore.

Excellent.

This doesn't seem to clearly identify anywhere what it is that is being measured; everything is based on a "latent factor for consumtion of alcohol" that is said to be standardized, but never given a proper definition. The closest I could find was:

"Indicators of alcohol consumption in the Add Health data include the frequency of binge drinking (drinking five or more units of alcohol in one sitting) and the frequency of getting drunk."

That doesn't say if those are the only factors used, or if they mixed in several different data sets until they found a combination that made for a compelling graph. I'll give them credit for mentioning that they've controlled for income though, as that was my first assumption.

I would be interested to know if the skew is really in total alcohol consumption, or if one side tends to binge occasionally while the other gets lightly buzzed frequently, or if there is a different split entirely that this is glossing over.

Maybe the world would be a better place if going drinking with your friends on Sunday mornings were the sociological norm instead of attending religious services.

That reminds me of another reason I drink- atheists.

Funny, watching the conservative religious destroy our country similarly drives me to drink.

I drink because it helps me relax and stop thinking about what the idiots at work and in our government have done to my life.