Forbes.com, the online part of the conservative financial organization, announced recently their list of the nation’s “drunkest cities.” Here’s the full list:

1. Milwaukee
2. Minneapolis-St. Paul
3. Columbus, Ohio
4. Boston
5. Austin, Texas
6. Chicago
7. Cleveland
8. Pittsburgh
9. Tie:
   • Philadelphia
   • Providence, R.I.
10. St. Louis
11. San Antonio
12. Seattle
13. Las Vegas
14. Denver/Boulder
15. Tie:
    • Cincinnati
    • Kansas City
16. Houston
17. Portland, Oregon
18. Tie:
    • San Francisco-Oakland
    • Washington-Baltimore
19. Phoenix
20. Los Angeles
21. Tie:
    • New Orleans
    • Tampa
22. Norfolk
23. Dallas-Fort Worth
24. Tie:
    • Atlanta
    • Detroit
25. Indianapolis
26. Orlando
27. New York
28. Miami
29. Charlotte, N.C.
30. Nashville

Setting aside the inanity of such a list, how — one might reasonably wonder — did they come up with such a list and keep a straight face?

Well here’s what they have to say:

Each city was ranked in five areas:

1. state laws
2. drinkers
3. heavy drinkers
4. binge drinkers
5. alcoholism

Each metro was assigned a score in each category, based on quantitative data. All five categories were then totaled into a final score, which was sorted into our final rankings. For a fuller explanation, read the methodology used.

But here they are in nutshell, with some of my own commentary.

1. State Laws:

Cities were ranked on a scale of 1 to 8, with states deemed to have the least restrictive laws getting a higher score. They considered such intangibles as whether MADD liked that state’s alcohol laws, whether there was a law banning open containers and if kegs had to be tagged with identifying tags. Well, how scientific. How any of those vague standards can be said to make one state more “drunk” than another is simply ludicrous. The idea that a more permissive society in and of itself causes alcohol abuse or even leads to it is specious at best. Just because open containers are allowed, for example, does not mean citizens will necessarily abuse alcohol. That such a flimsy set of criterion was used and is being reported seriously is astounding.

2. Drinkers:

Cities were ranked from highest to lowest and given a score based on the number of each town’s residents who admitted to having one drink in the last month. One drink! Have we really gone so far down the neo-prohibitionist path that one drink in 30 days is equal to being an alcohol abuser? The idea that the more people who have one drink each month, the more abuse is occurring in a geographic area is so fallacious that it’s downright insulting. They use the seemingly non-judgmental term to describe this as a larger “percentage of [the town’s] population are alcohol consumers.” Well so what? last time I checked alcohol was still legal in this country and I can hardly see how a drink a month rises to the level where any reasonable person would be concerned.

3. Heavy Drinkers:

Scored similar to #2, but this time it was based on “the number of adult men who reported having had more than two drinks per day, and adult women having had more than one drink per day.” Apparently that’s what constitutes a “heavy drinker.” It doesn’t appear to make a difference what type of drink it is which apparently means there’s no difference between three pints of beer and three pints of whiskey per day. Yeah, that seems reasonable. So a beer with lunch and two with dinner and you’re a heavy drinker!

4. Binge Drinkers:

Scored like the previous two, the Forbes survey defined “binge drinking” as five or more drinks on one occasion. Is that ever? Within a year? What? To say that if you’ve ever had five beers at one party makes you a binge drinker is beyond ridiculous. It’s more than a little misleading to suggest that drinking one beer short of a six-pack one time makes you anything bad at all. Take the Super Bowl as an example. With pregame, long commercial breaks, an overblown half-time show and post game analysis it weighs in easily at least as long as five hours. So if you had one beer every hour during that one occasion you were a binge drinker according to Forbes and the CDC. Sure you are. What utter rubbish.

5. Alcoholism:

As laughably contemptible as the first four criteria were, this one takes the cake. Scoring was done “based on the number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings held in the area, as a proportion of the number of residents over the legal drinking age.” Okay, personally I don’t agree with the idea of AA. To me, people are simply trading one addiction for a more socially acceptable one. But it obviously does work for some people and at least those who go to AA are trying to help themselves. So to measure a town’s relative drunkenness by the number of people trying to help themselves is not only wildly off the mark, it’s highly insulting to those attending the meetings. Is there a calculation or formula that explains how many people are alcoholics but not seeking help through AA. Are there no other methods, perhaps even private ones or clinics, besides AA?

The ways in which these results were calculated is so completely outside the realm of reality that it’s amazing an organization so supposedly respectable would have anything to do with it. I haven’t even scratched the surface on the ways in which these results are misleading and just plain wrong. They’re just too obvious and there are too many ways in which to show how embarrassingly disgraceful this list is.

A report on the survey by television station KPTV Channel 12 in Oregon added the following:

Forbes pointed out some surprising results. Some stereotypically “partying” cities didn’t rank high on the list. Las Vegas came in at only No. 14; New Orleans, home to Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras, only ranked in 24th place. And a town known for spring-break revelers, Miami, was only No. 33 on a list of 35 cities.

Well, perhaps it was the way in which the rankings were created in the first place. Given the amount of alcohol that flows in Las Vegas, couldn’t that fact alone be a clue that the results are erroneous? Saying people drink more in Providence, Rhode Island or Columbus, Ohio than in Vegas isn’t just “surprising,” it’s downright fiction. It could only come out that way if you design the survey to have little or no basis in reality.

So given how obviously absurd this all is, you have to wonder why an outfit like Forbes would put its name on something like this and publish it at all. It’s not exactly obvious what they’re up to. But if you look closely at the other items in Forbes’ “The Business of Nightlife,” of which America’s Drunkest Cities is just one part, there’s a link to an article entitled Cutting Alcohol’s Cost. This article is about the costs that people drinking — not even necessarily on the job — brings to businesses in increased health care and lower productivity. I should have guessed it would return, as things tend to do, to money. And their assertions that people who abuse alcohol do cause those problems may even be correct, but they completely ignore any factors that might cause their workers to drink, as if people generally make conscious choices to become alcoholics. And while there may be a few who are genetically predisposed to drink too much, I’m willing to bet that the stress of their jobs made as many or more drink too much as any other factor.

A study by the George Washington University Medical Center examined the incidence of “problem drinkers” (whatever that means) by different industries broadly defined and found that in the general population for every thousand people, an average of 91 are problem drinkers. The industries with higher than average problem drinking included:

1. Construction and Mining 135
2. Wholesale 115
3. Retail 114
4. Leisure and Hospitality 109
5. Repair and Business Services 106
6. Agriculture 106
7. Transportation and Utilities 96

At the bottom of the list was professionals with only 54 in every 1,000. But notice the jobs most associated with drinking are also the ones with the highest stress, the lowest wages and/or the lowest respect. Professionals have unquestionably the highest income among the list and so it’s not terribly surprising that the have fewer problems with drinking. But Forbes knows its readers and so is more interested in how to get more productivity out of low-level employees by getting them to stop drinking than addressing the root causes of that drinking. They could just as reasonably suggested that to avoid drinking problems employers should pay them better, treat them with more respect and not put so much pressure on them that severe stress is produced. But sympathy for labor has rarely been considered by big business.

Curiously, but perhaps not surprisingly, big business was generally very supportive of the first temperance movements that agitated for prohibition in the late 1800s and into the early part of the last century. The industrial revolution had recently changed the business landscape and with workers using so many more machines, business owners looked for ways to keep their employees sober. Of course, making the machines safer, having shorter work hours or better working conditions overall might also have been beneficial to the workers, but it would have cost the business owners profits. Better they try to change the workers habits both on the job and more intrusively off the job. So many businesses gave money to support temperance groups and helped usher in a climate where prohibition was possible, all in the name of commerce. Breweries saw it all coming, of course, and tried to counteract the temperance movement with moderation PR campaigns and ads that focused on the tradition and heritage of beer. But it was too little, too late, and Prohibition decimated the industry and probably led to the Great Depression.

Then as now, business didn’t care about why their workers drank. That might focus attention on their own actions and it does nothing for the bottom line. Labor unions were created because so many were treated so unfairly for so long. If it weren’t for labor unions, we’d all still be working six or even seven days a week, far more than 8 hours a day and have far less safe working environments. All of these and more happened because workers fought to improve their lives and business fought these innovations every step of the way.

From the Forbes article:

Each year, alcohol abuse costs the United States an estimated $185 billion, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. But only $26 billion, 14% of the total, comes from direct medical costs or treating alcoholics. Almost half, a whopping $88 billion, comes from lost productivity — a combination of all those hangovers that keep us out of work on Monday mornings, as well as other alcohol-related diseases. People who drink too much and too often are at greater risk for diabetes and several kinds of cancer, according to some studies.

“Alcohol is a worthless drug that affects every single cell in your body,” says Harris Stratyner, director of addiction recovery services at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Even hair transplants can fail because of the damage, he says.

“A worthless drug”? I know millions of people who might take issue with that statement. Anything and everything has the capacity to be abused. You could overdose on aspirin. That doesn’t make it a worthless drug, does it? People drink for many different reasons, of course, but certainly its popularity comes at least partly from the temporary positive effects alcohol has on the body. It allows one to relax, feel a little bit less stress for a period of time, give a feeling of euphoria. That some people might crave that feeling more often than others is directly proportional to how they feel about the rest of their lives. If you have a crappy job, a bad love life, etc. you might reasonably seek ways to feel better, and that might include alcohol. To ignore this, and other reasons why people might drink too much, in addressing alcohol’s impact on society is to overlook one of the most important aspects of the problem.

This series of stories by Forbes, and especially this last one addressing the relationship between worker productivity and alcohol, is startlingly reminiscent of big businesses’ support for prohibition groups over a century ago. And like the Anti-Saloon League, American Temperance Society and the Prohibition Party (among many others) the neo-prohibitionist groups of today are gaining power, especially political power. If business is truly once again supporting neo-prohibitionist causes to increase worker productivity, then we may be in for some dark days ahead. Today’s politics, of course, is very closely aligned with business interests so it doesn’t seem too far a leap to suggest that the conditions are once again repeating themselves in such a way that the possibility of another prohibition doesn’t seem as far-fetched as might have even a decade ago. That news alone might drive me to have another drink.