Buffalo makes another Top 100 List. Let's Drink to that!

In a recent Men’s Health article, "America’s Drunkest Cities," Buffalo ranked in 66th place out of 100 cities. Fresno, CA, came in first, while Boston, MA, came in dead-last.  Buffalo was more sober than neighboring friend Pittsburgh (59th), but a bit more tipsy than those lightweights, Cleveland (73rd) and Rochester (98th).

Usually, when Buffalo makes a top 100 list of any kind, we like to jump all over it like Ryan Miller on a puck. But in this case, Men’s Health ranked cities according to “most liver disease, most binge drinking, most deaths in DUI-related crashes, most DUI arrests and least stringent DUI laws.”
Oops. Perhaps it's not exactly cause to lift our glasses in celebration.

Men's Health took a cue from Forbes magazine who, four years ago, published a top list of their own.  In the Forbes list of drunken cities, Buffalo was not mentioned.

So what happened? Did Buffalo get less sober, or were the methodologies of the two lists different? Well, if you ever attended a statistics class in college, (or were friends with a drunken frat boy that did,) you will know that things can get pretty misleading with statistics, and the same statistics can usually be presented in totally different ways when you interpret the data on which they are based.  Politicians do this all the time.

For example, would not "DUI crashes and arrests" be logically higher in snowy Buffalo, where more people drive their own car - rather than densely urban cities like Manhattan or San Francisco, where drinkers are more likely to walk or take public transportation?  Of the five criteria of study, three of them involve automobiles, and the fourth, "binge-drinking" relies on self-reported numbers, not the most accurate.   The survey doesn’t attempt to correct for those sorts of differences.  And no effort was made to look at per-capita consumption of alcohol based on reliable sources like tax revenue on beer, wine, and spirits sales.

But, you can't really blame Men's Health for inadequacies like this in an attention grabbing list like "Drunkest Cities."  Like Cosmopolitan for women, Men's Health often has a tendency to resort to fluff and content-lite features to fill their pages, and I doubt that many, besides us, paid much attention to the List.