VIDEO – LUCKY TO BE ALIVE! –
April 2026 – Mark Chesnutt took his final drink of alcohol on Nov. 1, 2023 after years of heavy drinking that worsened after a spinal surgery in 2021. Chesnutt has opened up in the past about his alcoholism. Now, he’s opening up about the specifics of how much he drank. In a new interview with radio show Big D and Bubba, the singer opened up about the stark details. “I drank all day, every day,” Chesnutt says. “I’d get up in the middle of the night and drink. I’d never stop.”
A handle of alcohol is the big bottle with the handle, hence the name, and it equals roughly half of a gallon.
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a handle of 80-proof distilled spirits equals about 39 and a half drinks. The NIAAA counts a “heavy drinking day” as five drinks per day for a man, four drinks per day for a woman.
That means that Chesnutt was consuming more than 7 times the amount he needed to in order to be considered a heavy daily drinker.
