If you are an average American with an average education and an average media diet, you probably see the problem of alcohol addiction more or less like this pie chart. (Actually, most people would draw the chart even more simply: as one little purple slice labeled “alcoholics” and then the rest of the pie labeled “everybody else.”)

Viewed from a demographic perspective, alcohol addiction affects only a small fraction of the population, about ten percent, and should not drive policy, except when it comes to protecting the public from such people.

But there’s another way to view the problem, one that has been systematically downplayed but is perfectly evident in data collected by the United States government. This perspective focuses more on alcohol itself and produces a very different pie chart.

This perspective puts alcohol in the center of the frame and asks how it is actually used. It is based on a survey that divides the US population into tenths (or deciles) to figure out how much people actually drink and to make policy recommendations accordingly. All of this information—and a great deal more—is in Philip J. Cook’s magisterial study Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in alcohol policy.[1]

Anyway, here’s how Americans drink alcohol.[2] Thirty percent (deciles 1, 2, and 3) don’t drink at all. Another thirty percent, (deciles 4, 5, and 6), average between one drink a year and one drink every two weeks. That’s sixty percent of the US population that either abstains from alcohol or drinks very seldom.

The next tenth (decile 7) averages a little less than one drink every three days. These sound like people who have a drink or two at a weekend party or special dinner but abstain the rest of the time. That’s still light drinking, so we’ve now reached seventy percent of the US population that consumes very little or no alcohol. Most people I talk to about these percentages—and not just my fellow alcohol addicts—find them as startling as I did. After all, most of us grew up among—and later gravitated towards—heavy drinkers.

The next tenth (decile 8) approaches an average of one drink per day but doesn’t quite get there. The penultimate tenth (decile 9) represents the classic “normal drinker,” averaging slightly more than two drinks every day. Deciles 8 and 9 together are the drinkers we call “moderate,” only one-fifth of the population but disproportionately influential in how our culture imagines drinking: as something most adults enjoy daily. Television pushes this idea incessantly, and it is rare to see an episode of any television drama that does not involve quite a lot of routine drinking.[3]

These two tenths, especially decile 9, are the ones that appear on alcohol billboards and glossy magazine ads. They’re the ones legislators invoke when they allow liquor in grocery stores or cut taxes on craft beer. They’re a kind of beard, to use an old-fashioned term, a cover for a passionate but unacknowledged relationship: between the alcohol industry and the last tenth (decile 10). That’s us.

Ten percent of the US population averages more than 10 drinks every single day, 10.4 to be exact. By anybody’s definition, that’s an alcohol use disorder, whether transient and situational or closer to what we think of as classic alcoholism. An average of 10.4 drinks per day is a lot of booze. Half of that is a lot of booze. Half of that every other day is still a lot of booze, according to health experts, and that quantity is right at the bottom end of the decile, so, of course, there are also people drinking an average of 20.8 and 41.6 drinks per day in our decile.

When you really absorb these data, which the alcohol industry hopes you won’t even glance at, much less absorb, everything about alcohol and recovery starts to look different. To begin with, alcohol no longer seems an essentially benign substance, practically a food, that a few messed-up people can’t handle. Now it looks more like a drug that can be enjoyed by recreational users but is much more often abused. In this regard, it is no different from heroin, some of which is smoked or snorted (relatively) safely by occasional users but most of which is consumed by addicts.[4]

As I was reading Professor Cook’s book, I had an odd experience in the beer aisle of my local Safeway. Previously, I had viewed the beer the way I had been trained to: as an alluring beverage that I had the bad luck to be addicted to. When I saw beer in the supermarket, I didn’t see anything wrong with it, just with me. This time, as I rounded the corner and saw the bright wall of gleaming bottles, I thought, “Wow, most of that is functionally poison.” Just knowing that three of every four bottles would hurt their consumers changed my perspective: I no longer saw my problem as wholly in me; I saw it as partly in the product itself and the culture that celebrates it so relentlessly. Nothing so dramatic as “demon alcohol” but a real shift in perception.

Think about it this way. If the New York Times reported that three in four cans of Reddi Whip were being consumed by people abusing nitrous oxide (the gas that propels the cream from the nozzle), we would no longer regard the product as an innocuous dessert topping misused by a few reckless teenagers. We’d want it banned, not because that’s a good way to handle drugs of abuse,[5] but because the media would be so full of lurid stories about “whipped death” and pictures of teens slumped in a nitrous stupor that the public would denounce its continued presence on supermarket shelves. But we don’t react to alcohol that way, and I suddenly found that fact very peculiar.

Seeing the aisle of bottles in a new light changed the tone of my sobriety as well. Looking down the beer aisle, I realized that the alcohol industry had to know where most of those bottles would end up. As I explain in another essay,[6] the alcohol industry is more about marketing and less about innovation or product development than just about any other industry in the world. To think that they have somehow failed to grasp where most of their profits come from seemed preposterous at the time and has been amply confirmed by subsequent research. Sellers know they’re in the business of promoting alcohol abuse, from producers who name beers “Clobberskull” or “Faceplant” to store managers who wink at underage buyers as long as they pay.[7] Just like the tobacco industry, they know exactly what their product does, and they don’t care; their only health concern is for the health of their bottom line. Realizing that made me angry. I actually felt a tiny heave of revulsion—a big improvement on longing, let me tell you.

I started to feel that my decision to drink or not drink was political, as is the way I talk about my alcohol addiction. If I drink, I make a material contribution to an industry that knowingly exploits my vulnerability; I might as well make a donation to the Heritage Foundation. If I talk about alcohol addiction as my private problem, I let the industry off the hook for promoting that addiction.

On the policy side, looking at the second pie chart casts the issue of alcohol control in a different light. If three-fourths of this product is hurting people, then it should be much more strenuously regulated. Not banned—we have learned the lesson of Prohibition, I hope[8]—but not sold cheaply alongside food or vitamins or DIY shelving. It should be sold like cannabis is sold in states where cannabis is legal: in dedicated shops that adults must show ID to enter. That is how you handle a mind-altering drug, even one as relatively benign as cannabis.

Alcohol should also be taxed more heavily because taxation reduces consumption. I say this reluctantly because I otherwise oppose regressive taxation, but Professor Cook documents the relationship between taxation and consumption so thoroughly that it must be treated as fact. Further, at least part of the tax revenue should pay for responsible research and treatment for people with alcohol use disorders, who are not just collateral damage but targets of the industry. Finally, the industry and its lobbyists should not be permitted to influence policies, laws, research studies, or institutions concerned with the prevention or treatment of alcohol use disorders. It’s preposterous to believe for one moment that they have any interest in curbing the alcohol abuse that generates most of their profits.

I know the US has put a lot of foxes in charge of a lot of henhouses lately, but the alcohol industry has been sending foxes into henhouses such as the National Institutes of Health for decades without much public comment. No one who benefits so profoundly from our affliction should have a say in decisions affecting our health, ever. Again, look at the second pie chart. Listen to Professor Cook, who points out, very clearly that if we, the 10th decile, were somehow to start drinking like the 9th decile, the alcohol industry would lose sixty percent of its bottom line.

Sixty percent! The next time you wonder why, everywhere you go, you find drinking cues and triggers, the next time you start to think it must be solely the fault of your “disease,” remember that number.

[1] Philip J. Cook, Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2007). At some point, I’ll write a full essay on this remarkable book. For now, let me emphasize that its approach to alcohol policy is very thoughtful and nuanced, based on exhaustive, careful research and scrupulously fair to all stakeholders: government, the alcohol industry, and the public.

[2] To view this information as a chart, see page 57 of Paying the Tab or Christopher Ingraham, “Think you drink a lot? This chart will tell you.” Washington Post Wonkblog, September 25, 2014. I recommend taking a look; the information is more striking in visual form. Update: the Post started paywalling this info, so I put a copy of the chart in this blog post.

[3] Across the population, alcohol consumption increases along with wealth, status, and education. In some ways, it makes sense that better-off, more educated people who dominate media and the arts would replicate their own drinking behavior in the work they produce. There’s also pressure from the alcohol industry to feature drinking—often (though not necessarily) in the form of product placement. Finally, the persistent divide between drinking culture and temperance culture endows acts of drinking with unearned cachet, making it a kind of dramatic shorthand for qualities such as sophistication, cool, or rebellion. Regardless of its motives, TV presents the drinking landscape as divided between a tiny sliver of teetotalers, another tiny sliver of alcoholics, and a huge majority that drinks a lot every day without getting drunk.

[4] In the case of heroin, the safety of occasional use is compromised by the illegality of the drug, which leads to adulteration with toxins and uncertainty about dosage. Manufactured legally with government oversight, heroin would be safer to use occasionally than alcohol is.

[5] Just to be clear, I don’t think we should ban Reddi Whip. Or alcohol. Or many of the drugs that currently are banned. My point is that, as a culture, we tend to insist that dangerous things be banned, even if they’re not that dangerous, while making a few giant exceptions for things that (measured by their effects) really are dangerous. Alcohol is one of those things, though not the only one.

[6] See “Drugs ‘and’ Alcohol.”

[7] Not long ago, my local Safeway sold so much alcohol to underage drinkers that the state temporarily barred it from selling even beer or wine, wrapping the refrigerator cases in grey canvas and posting stern notices. Nonetheless, proxy buyers (mostly indigent alcoholics) still hang around outside the store from about 3:00 on and all day on weekends.

[8] Yes, I’m being disingenuous. I know we’ve scarcely learned anything from Prohibition, as we continue to prohibit all kinds of recreational drugs, making criminals of otherwise law-abiding people and creating huge black markets that fund organized crime, terrorism, and a host of other social ills. In fact, we deserve about a D+ on the Lesson of Prohibition.