I agree, and that's why I find prescriptivist approaches like "You should only have 9 drinks a week" frustrating. I wasn't getting whitegirlwasted or shitfaced. I was at a bar hanging out with a ton of people. But if you simply count the number of drinks I had, ohmygod I've got a drinking problem. People seem to assume with drink counts that your drinking is compressed into a shorter period of time. I spent 12 hours at a bar once. God knows how many drinks I had that day, but I had the day off, showed up at noon, and just had a good time hanging out with a ton of people as they came and left. By the end of the night I got slurry but I maintained for a good long time first. By prescriptivist standards I probably had enough drinks for the whole month that day. Never supposed to have more than 3 drinks in one day? More than 3 drinks is "heavy drinking"? What if I have them, as illustrated, over so many hours I never even get drunk? It reminds me of BMI.