It is excessive but you would be amazed about how much some people drink and manage to seem mostly normal for a long-time. 72 drinks a week isn’t even close to the gutter drunk category for a man. Alcoholism runs in my family deep into both sides. If some of my family members and a few friends told me they cut back to only about 10 drinks a day, I would be thrilled because it would be a huge improvement. Many of them have had stretches that lasted for years or decades when they drank at least double that if not much more. Once you get to those levels, you have to drink every single day. It can be extremely scary to life threatening if the person suddenly stops so all long-term alcoholics make sure they have redundant sources of alcohol wherever they go.
I don’t drink anymore because I once had a serious problem myself. I don’t want to implicate myself in anything so I will just say that 10 drinks a day would have been a very light dose for years at a stretch and there were long periods where I never went even close to that low.
The thing that most people don’t realize is that drinks don’t affect everyone equally. The effect 10 drinks has on a long-term hard drinker or alcoholic is about the same as one or two for a teetotaler. It isn’t universal, but many alcoholics don’t get hangovers either especially for any reasonable quantity consumed (about <20 a day). You probably will suffer some organ damage from it if you drink that much sustained for years or decades but you can adapt to it remarkably well in the short term. There are plenty of functional alcoholics that drink more than 72 drinks a week and have successful professional careers including doctors, lawyers and everything else.
If you want to see how widespread alcoholism is, go to a large ‘Open’ AA meeting as an educational exercise. The town I used to live in has 13,000 people and hosted an Open meeting in the Catholic church every Sunday night. The AA meeting usually had about 250 - 300 people in attendance voluntarily and it was common for more people to attend it than Sunday morning church services in a town that is largely Catholic. The first thing you will notice when you walk into one is just how normal everyone looks and acts. There is little old ladies, CEO’s, scientists and everything in between. Almost all of them will tell you the truth about how much time and energy they used to devote to drinking and how they tried to avoid bad consequences from it.
The problem is a whole lot more widespread, deeper and diverse than most people think until they have reason to be exposed to it. Again, I don’t know if the 10% figure is completely accurate or not but 72 drinks a week is practically nothing for long-term alcoholics and even some hard drinkers that spread their drinks out throughout the day. You can drink that much and never get drunk, legally or otherwise if you space it out correctly. The statistic is completely believable to me.