Dangerous Roads: States with Most Drunk Drivers Revealed

Live Science: ...Drunk driving continues to be a major cause of accidents, the researchers said. In 2013, more than 10,000 people died in car crashes in which the driver had a blood alcohol concentration above 0.08 percent, the legal limit for drunk driving.

To get a better sense of how common drunk driving is, the CDC researchers analyzed results from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, a random-dialing telephone survey that asks people about their risk-taking behavior. Based on that data, the researchers estimated that about 1.8 percent of the U.S. population, or about 4.2 million people, drove while under the influence the month before the survey.

This translates to a whopping 121 million drunk driving episodes nationally over the course of a year, the researchers said.

There were big regional differences in the drunk driving rate. In Hawaii, there were 995 drunk driving episodes yearly per 1,000 people — that means almost one incident for every person in the state. (Of course, this does not mean that every person in the state is driving drunk.) By contrast, Utah had just 217 yearly episodes of drunk driving per 1,000 people....

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Graph: See which states have the highest drunk-driving rate