Boston: Not that Drunk

We love this city for a number of reasons. Smart people live here. It’s easily walkable. Our sports teams are awesome (suck it, Philly! Again!), and politics is sport enough to keep us busy when the Sox and Pats aren’t playing. But what we may love most is how much everybody here drinks.

Which is why we were surprised that Boston ranked 19th out of 100 cities in a poll of the most dangerous drunken cities.

Just to be clear, we don’t endorse the activities the study used to rate the dangerousness of a city’s drunks.

[Men’s Health] looked at death rates from liver disease as well as binge drinking rates. It also factored in drunken-driving arrests, the rate of fatal car accidents involving alcohol and state efforts to cut drinking.

Drinking and driving is bad, kids. Don’t do it.

But 19th? We’re better than this. We’ve got college students. We’ve got the Irish. We’ve got hangovers. Most of the time it’s so cold we need liquor for warmth, and the rest of the time we’re drinking to celebrate the nice weather.

Maybe we lost out to Denver because we can walk home instead of drunkenly navigating the streets in cars. We also don’t have alcohol for sale at every convenience store as they do out West. We do our part to keep Boston drunk. Clearly some of you aren’t drowning your livers in champagne. And we thought we knew you.