This Is The Country That Drinks The Most Alcohol

While Americans can certainly hold their beer and liquor, European countries make up most of the top 20 nations for most alcohol consumed per person — there's a reason many of our global drinking traditions are from Europe. And at the head of that list is Romania, with 17 liters of pure alcohol consumed per capita in people aged over 15 in 2019, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report on world health statistics (Coming in at second, third, and fourth are Georgia at 14.3, the Czech Republic at 13.3, and Latvia at 13.1; in comparison, the U.S. drinks only 9.6 liters per capita).

The country perhaps best known as the home of Vlad the Impaler (but also as the place where pastrami originated), Romania also had the second-highest percentage of binge drinkers, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, at 36% of the total adult population, coming in just behind Denmark at 37%. Binge drinking is defined as consuming about 2 ounces (60 grams) of pure alcohol in a single sitting. A third report, from the Lancet, also finds that Romanian men drink, on average, 8.2 drinks each day, the highest of any country.

This high rate of alcohol consumption is not great for the health of Romanians on the whole, as we now know that alcohol isn't good for us in even small amounts, per a review in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Romania has some of the highest alcohol-related cancer and liver cirrhosis death rates in the world, as well as being ranked by the WHO as a 4, on a scale of 1-5, for years of life lost due to alcohol (5 being the most). There is also the effect on Romanian youth to consider; a study found that Romanians aged 18-24 spent 17 times as much on alcohol than they did on cultural pursuits.

You might be wondering what the Romanian government is doing to fight against this issue. It has placed some restrictions on alcohol consumption, such as its zero-tolerance policy on drinking and driving, advertisement restrictions, and health warnings on alcohol labels. However, the drinking age is just 18, and not only is alcohol widely available in the country, but you can drink it pretty much anywhere.