Last week Boston was named America’s tipsiest town by the social anthropologists at the Daily Beast. All that revelry comes at a price, though. The party-poopers at the Atlantic step in to showcase the dark side of drunkenness. (Spoiler alert: Drinking can cause worse problems than ill-fated hook-ups, and it’s a good thing that Boston has a ton of hospitals.)
Reveals one local doctor: “From my perspective in its trenches, ranking Boston the booziest rings true. … Alcohol contributed to the vast majority of traumatic brain injury cases I treated this year… My ten-minute personal reflection indicates Boston’s drug of choice is involved in at least three quarters of crashes generating a traumatic brain injury severe enough for the rehabilitation hospital.” OK, so this data isn’t culled from the annals of the New England Journal of Medicine, but still: Eeek.
The doctor’s tales of woe include elderly people falling in the bathroom after one too many “nightcaps,” high-functioning office workers driving home after post-work boozefests, and serious alcoholics unable to seek inpatient treatment thanks to overcrowding in Boston’s (busy as can be!) rehab centers.
In other news, a ton of new cocktail bars opened last month.
Boston’s Brain Drain [Atlantic]
