In the United States, 8.5% of adults age 18 and older have met criteria for alcohol use disorders in the last 12 months, and 30.3% have met them at some point in their lifetime (Hasin & Grant, 2015). The economic burden of alcohol misuse in the US was recently estimated at $249 billion per year, with three quarters of the total cost related to binge drinking (Sacks, Gonzales, Bouchery, Tomedi, & Brewer, 2015). In 2012–2013, 33% of US adults reported past year drinking at binge levels (five drinks or more for men and four drinks or more for women, over 2 hours). Many drank at binge levels at least weekly (Hingson, Zha, & White, 2017) and 13% reporting drinking beyond twice binge level, defined by NIAAA as “high intensity drinking” (Hingson et al., 2017).
