America’s relationship with alcohol is getting better and worse at the same time. Fewer people are drinking overall, which is nice. But for those still clinging to the bottle, things are worse than ever.
A new study from UCLA just confirmed that alcohol is killing people at nearly twice the rate it did 25 years ago. Between 1999 and 2024, alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. spiked 89 percent, according to PLOS Global Health.
The peak came in 2021, surprisingly in the middle of COVID, when over 54,000 Americans died directly from drinking. And while those numbers have dipped slightly since then, they’re still a solid 25 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic.
This isn’t specifically about people who drink themselves into alcohol poisoning. That remains relatively rare. Instead, the big killers are the ones that are slow burns: alcoholic liver disease, and all the mental and behavioral offshoots of heavy alcohol consumption.
Why Alcohol Deaths in America Keep Rising
Chronic drinkers are literally aging into death, and it’s happening faster—and younger—than ever. Even more unsettling is that this crisis is happening across demographics. Historically, men were overwhelmingly victims of alcohol induced death.
That gap is closing. Women ages 25 to 34 saw the sharpest rise in alcohol-related deaths over the study period. In 1999, the male-to-female mortality ratio in that group was 3 to 1. In 2024, it was 2 to 1.
Populations living in extreme conditions of any quality, like American Indian and Alaska native populations, were disproportionately affected.
This study only includes deaths directly attributed to alcohol. It doesn’t factor in the long list of chronic illnesses that booze makes worse, like heart disease, cancer, and mental health disorders.
As Gizmodo points out, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism puts the full death toll of excessive drinking at over 178,000 Americans per year.
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