A little less than five years ago, the Washington Post‘s Christopher Ingraham reported that “the top 10 percent of American drinkers — 24 million adults over age 18 — consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week.

“That works out to a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels, 18 bottles of wine, or three 24-can cases of beer. In one week. Or, if you prefer, 10 drinks per day.”

So five years ago we had 24 million woozy drunks stumbling around like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. I’ll bet that figure has risen among Democrats over the last two and half years.

During my worst vodka-and-pink-lemonade period (’93 to early ’96) I was downing maybe two glasses a night. During my white wine heyday I would sip two glasses a night, three or four if I was at a party. I embraced sobriety on 3.20.12.

Ingraham’s data was from Philip J. Cook’s “Paying the Tab,” an economically-minded examination of the costs and benefits of alcohol control in the U.S. Specifically, they’re calculations made using the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) data.