Chicago, The City of Big Drinkers

By Margaret Lyons in News on Aug 8, 2008 4:10PM

Chicago is the fifth-hardest drinking city in America, according to a new analysis by Forbes, who's really feeling the ranking stories this week. We drink less than Austin, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Providence. Providence?

The report is based on people's responses to three questions: whether they had at least one drink of alcohol within the past 30 days; whether men had more than two drinks per day or women one drink per day; and whether they had five or more drinks on one occasion. (The five-drinks question counted twice.) Forbes used information from the CDC's 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, which found that 62 percent of Chicagoans had had at least one drink in the last month, 5.4 percent were regular drinkers, and 20.4 percent had consumed five or more drinks on one occasion. Cheers. [Forbes, photo by sictransitgloria]