Per capita consumption of alcohol for each state from 1980–2009 was obtained from a report of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (Lavallee et al., 2011). The Alcohol Epidemiologic Data System (AEDS) collects alcohol beverage sales and/or tax receipts data from states. For states where that data is not available, AEDS collects shipments data from beverage industry sources. To calculate alcohol consumption per capita, AEDS uses state population of persons ages 14 and older in the state obtained from the U.S. Census as the denominator. AEDS chose 14 even though it is much below the legal age for drinking because many adolescents report drinking alcohol. Before calculating per capita consumption estimates, the gallons of sold or shipped beer, wine and spirits are converted into gallons of ethanol (Lavallee et al., 2011). We examined per capita consumption of all alcoholic beverages combined, and per capita consumption of each type of alcoholic beverage separately.
