How do you measure up?

Americans are drinkers, but surprisingly, are far down the list of the world’s biggest alcohol consumers. If you are an American and claim to have a glass of wine with dinner each night, you are in the top 30 percent of per capita alcohol consumption.

Having two glasses puts you in the top 20 percent of imbibers. That escalates quickly – if you have two bottles of wine with dinner, you would break into the top 10 percent, but just barely. The heaviest of heavy drinkers – about 24 million adults – have an average consumption of 74 alcohol drinks per week. According to the Washington Post, that’s 4.5 bottles of Jack Daniels, three 24-can cases of beer, and 18 bottles of wine per week. That comes out to 10 drinks per day.

Those heavy drinkers are putting down roughly half of America’s alcohol consumption per year. They are balanced out by the 30 percent of Americans who don’t drink at all and the additional 30 percent who have one drink per week or less.

The Grim Statistics

The National Institutes of Health’s Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports that as of 2013, 86.8 percent of people age 18 and older had consumed an alcoholic beverage at some point in their lifetime. Of them, 70.7 percent had a drink in the past year, and 56.4 percent had a drink in the past month.

Most people who drink handle it responsibly. That alcohol abuse is rampant among the minority who cannot should come as no surprise to anyone who has even a casual observance of society. About 1.3 million adults received treatment for alcoholism at a facility in 2013, and 73,000 adolescents had treatment.