Statistics on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the US

Using data from four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine alcohol use patterns and criminal activity from adolescence to young adulthood. Fixed-effects models partially address the potential endogeneity of alcohol use, and, because numerous studies indicate that males are more likely than females to engage in drinking and criminal activity, the analyses are segmented by gender. Police recorded crime has wider offence coverage and population coverage than the CSEW.

Over the years, the rates of alcohol abuse and alcoholism in the US have shown significant changes. The District of Columbia’s alcohol-related death rate increases faster than any U.S. state’s, and the rate of binge drinkers is very high. The risk of sexual assault increases significantly upon alcohol consumption as the depressant reduces social anxiety, thus leading to potentially offensive behaviors that would be avoidable when sober. Once intoxicated, alcohol abusers tend to become unruly, aggressive, and disruptive, which increases the risks of avoidable injuries, accidents, and crimes. Bank and credit account fraud increased by 15% to about 2.2 million incidents, and consumer and retail fraud increased by 26% to about 1 million incidents.

New Mexico Alcohol Abuse Statistics

Underage drinkers are slightly less common among alcohol-related deaths in Washington. Massachusetts has one of the nation’s lowest rates of under-21 alcohol-related drinking deaths. Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of under-21 drinkers among its alcohol-related deaths. Alcohol-related deaths in Kansas are slightly more likely to involve males and underage drinkers. Florida has an elevated alcohol-related death rate but one of the lowest rates of under-21 deaths.

Notes for prevalence of alcohol-related violence

An individual who reported being drunk or “very high on alcohol” monthly during the past 12 months. An individual who reported being drunk or “very high on alcohol” at least once during the past 12 months. A monthly drinker is an individual who reported drinking 1 to 12 days during the past 12 months. Where C is a dichotomous measure of crime, A′ is a vector of dichotomous measures of alcohol use, X′ is a vector of control variables, u represents unobserved individual factors, e is a random error, and the βs are coefficients to be estimated. Utah has the second-highest rate of female alcohol-related deaths and has the highest percentage of deaths due to acute causes. South Dakota has an elevated rate of alcohol-related deaths per capita and a high rate of under-21 deaths.

• Rates of criminal activity for male respondents in the Add Health data are more than double those for females in all four waves.
• The latest provisional admissions data for NHS hospitals in England and Wales showed a 3% decrease in the number of admissions for assault by a sharp object in YE September 2024 (to 3,735 admissions).
• In this chapter, CSEW ‘alcohol-related’ violent incidents3 are defined as those violent incidents where the victim perceived the offender(s) to be under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident.
• New Mexico has the third-highest number of alcohol-related deaths per capita among all the states; it’s 23.4% higher than Alaska’s per capita death rate, which is the nation’s second-highest.
• Charges range from misdemeanors to felony offenses, and penalties for impaired driving can include driver’s license revocation, fines, and jail time.
• Alcohol-related deaths in Vermont are average, but under-21 deaths are among the lowest nationwide.
• As a result, these data are only able to provide a partial and provisional picture but they do provide useful support to the CSEW findings.

Criminal damage

The proportion of violence against the person offences flagged as domestic abuse-related was 33%, similar to the previous year’s 34%. In answering these questions, the current analysis addresses many of the gaps in the growing body of literature on substance use and crime. This approach overcomes one of the key limitations of existing studies that do not adequately control for such characteristics. Second, our results are specific to adolescents and young adults, while the majority of previous work in the area has focused on adults.

It is not mandatory for forces to populate this field and not all forces are presently supplying crime data to the Home Office via the Data Hub. Analysis using these data is therefore limited to 21 of the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales, and is subject to continuing quality assurance. These forces account for over half (61%)1 of the violence against the person offences in England and Wales and include data from the Metropolitan Police, who alone record around a fifth of offences in England and Wales. We estimate gender-specific models to analyze the differential effects of alcohol use on criminal activity (Robbins and Martin, 1993; Steffensmeier and Allan, 1996).

Economic Impact of Drug-Related Crime

Police recorded a 2% increase in theft, with 1.8 million offences in YE September 2024. This rise was mainly because of a 23% increase in shoplifting (to 492,914 offences) and a 22% increase in theft from the person (to 146,109 offences). There have been sharp rises in these offences since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Share of crimes which are alcohol-related

• Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime data together give a fuller picture of crimes experienced by individuals and households (Table 1).
• The police recorded 550 homicide offences in year ending (YE) September 2024, a 4% decrease from 572 offences in the previous year.
• By March 2024, 42 police forces had switched to NDQIS for knife or sharp instrument offences, 37 forces for domestic abuse-related offences and 31 for child sexual abuse-related offences.
• An emerging trend identified by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is “High-Intensity Drinking” (HID), which involves consuming alcohol at levels that are two or more times the binge drinking thresholds.
• The mean score given for alcohol-related violent incidents was 6.7, significantly lower than non alcohol-related violent incidents, where the mean score was 7.3 (Appendix Table 5.09 (1.42 Mb Excel sheet)).
• Investigating these relationships empirically is challenging because estimates will be biased if alcohol use is endogenous (i.e., correlated with an unmeasured and/or unobserved factor(s) that is also related to criminal activity).
• The CSEW also collects information on the location of the incident, which can include locations in or around licensed premises, and on whether the victim was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident.

Of those motorcycle riders, 1,705 (29%) were drunk (BAC of .08 g/dL or higher). Drivers with a BAC of .08 are approximately 4 times more likely to crash than drivers with a BAC of zero. At a BAC of .15, drivers are at least 12 times more likely to crash than drivers with a BAC of zero. The component links below will help you find what you’re looking for but you should also consider searching all Department of Justice websites to find exactly what you need.

In every state, it’s illegal to drive drunk, yet one person was killed in a drunk-driving crash every 39 minutes in alcohol-related crime statistics the United States in 2022. If you drive while impaired, you could get arrested, or worse — be involved in a traffic crash that causes serious injury or death. Know that alcohol steadily decreases a person’s ability to drive a motor vehicle safely. In 2022, there were 2,337 people killed in alcohol-related crashes where a driver had a BAC of .01 to .07 g/dL. Third, the conditional fixed-effects logit models do not use the observations that lack within-group variation in the dependent variable. Nevertheless, results of fixed-effects linear probability models that use the entire sample of respondents are consistent with our core results.

Michigan has a slightly higher rate of alcohol-related deaths and female drinking deaths. Kentucky is a statistical anomaly with a low rate of underage drinking deaths and a low rate of chronic causes. Statistics indicate that Illinois may have a significant underage drinking problem though its under-21 death rate has declined in recent years.

Around 2.9 million fraud incidents involved a loss, and victims were fully reimbursed in 1.9 million of these cases. There were no statistically significant changes for YE September 2024 compared with the previous year in any of the subcategories of theft. This included theft from the person, other theft of personal property, domestic burglary, other household theft, vehicle-related theft and bicycle theft. Roughly 35% (69,958 offences) of all sexual offences recorded by the police in YE September 2024 were rape offences. Most knife-enabled crime takes place in metropolitan areas across England and Wales, with 30% of all offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), 9% by the West Midlands Police and 6% by Greater Manchester Police. The majority of knife-enabled crimes were assault with injury, and assault with intent to cause serious harm (43%), and robbery offences (43%).