A little slice out of our local newspaper…. 
If Men’s Health magazine is to be trusted, a good many of you are reading the newspaper this morning with blurred vision and a pounding headache.
The magazine announced last week that its March issue will include a list of the 100 “drunkest cities” in the country, with Billings, our very own Magic City, ranked No. 3.
Only Fresno, Calif., and Reno, Nev., were ranked higher than Billings — “higher” being the operative word.
Montanans are scratching their heads and thinking, “Billings? Not Butte?” Well, Men’s Health used to go with the 100 biggest cities in the country for its various rankings, but then changed the format to include at least one city in every state.
In Montana, we’re it.
Cheyenne, the only Wyoming city on the list, came in at No. 19, two notches below Denver, which was the drunkest city in 2007, the last time Men’s Health released a similar survey.
Most surprising was that Boston ranked at 100, the soberest city on the list, four places above Salt Lake City.
How Boston got that ranking, given its large numbers of college students and Irishmen, not to mention “Cheers,” is beyond me, and I won’t even make any Kennedy-family jokes.
A dubious record
As for Billings, all I can say is that it could have been worse. I spoke with Matt Marion, a deputy editor at Men’s Health, who told me that Billings actually did well in one category in the survey — the number of DUI arrests in each city.
Marion didn’t want to release detailed results until the magazine hits the racks, but he said Billings got high marks for making lots of DUI arrests, which supposedly demonstrates that the city is serious about cracking down on drunken driving.
But what if the researchers read this newspaper on a regular basis and saw how many of our DUI arrests involved drivers racking up their third, fourth, seventh or 12th DUI? Maybe we would have left Reno and Fresno in the dust.
Other factors that went into the ranking were the number of deaths by alcoholic liver disease, the incidence of binge drinking, the number of fatal crashes involving booze and the severity of state laws regarding drunken driving.
In the 2007 survey, when Billings came in at a fairly sober No. 70, our state laws were ranked dead last.
Marion didn’t say what our rank is this year in regard to our laws, but I don’t imagine we’ve made much progress.
This year, he said, we’re close to the bottom in the number of drunken-driving fatalities and in the bottom 20 in terms of death caused by alcoholic liver disease.
I hope part of the reason for our dismal ranking is that we don’t have much in the way of public transportation in these parts, certainly not at closing time. And maybe Boston did well in the liver-disease category because under its Marxist-Leninist health care system, really sick people are simply taken out and shot.
No finger-wagging
But here I am making light of the whole thing. Marion assured me that this list is meant to serve as “a wake-up call” alerting communities to the danger of “destructive drinking habits.”
“It definitely shouldn’t be taken as a point of pride,” he said of our ranking. “At the same time, we aren’t wagging our fingers at any particular city.”
Maybe. But it’s also important to remember that the main purpose of such lists — whether they’re ranking the drunkest cities, the safest cities or cities where you’re least likely to be attacked by feral hogs — is to sell magazines.
Not quite two years ago, Best Life magazine, an offshoot of Men’s Health, ranked Billings as the third-best city in the country in which to raise a family.
So, we’re the third-family-friendliest town in America and the third-booziest town in America. What gives?
“It’s not necessarily contradictory,” Marion assured me. “Every city is going to have its pros and cons.”
So does every unscientific magazine survey. You may recall that in 1992, Billings came in at No. 6 on Money magazine’s list of the 300 best cities in the United States. By 1993, we had dropped to No. 261, for no plausible reason anyone could think of. Maybe that’s when we started hitting the bottle.
My advice is to take all these magazine rankings with more than a grain of salt. And a slice of lime.
