Lower the drinking age?
Several college presidents have gotten together to request the lowering of the legal drinking age to 18.
College students, they say, will drink no matter what, and the law creates a “culture of dangerous, clandestine binge-drinking.”
Detractors of the proposal say that, far from lowering the amount of drinking, it would increases drinking, and lead to more alcohol-related deaths. According to them, this proposal is opportunistic, corresponding more to an unwillingness or inability to deal with on-campus drinking than anything else:
“I wish that college presidents would attempt to deal with the problem rather than ignore it,” said Jim Noffsinger, Indiana coordinator for SADD — Students Against Drunk Drivers. “
Being the youngster that I am, I didn’t know that the drinking age didn’t even become 21 until 1984. Before then it was 18. The United States has one of the most restrictive age limits outside the Muslim world. The vast majority of countries allow drinking at 18, with some going down to 16.
Now, though the legal drinking age in the is 21, I have to seriously wonder how effective that has been. How many young adults have actually waited until the legal age before drinking? The legal consequences of underage drinking are very minor, and many states have exceptions to this rule for private consumption, consumption in family settings, religious services etc.
I don’t know whether the assertion that making drinking illegal under the age of 21 leads to more dangerous drinking habits is true or not. However, I expect it wouldn’t be a phenomenon that’s too difficult to study. That said, I don’t see why Americans need to be assumed to be less responsible than the rest of the civilized world, and therefore in need of more restrictive laws. The age of 21 for drinking is not even some long held tradition, but a law that is not even 30 years old. Many of the people reading this grew up in a time when the legal age was 18, and are presumably alive, well and not alcoholics.
The problem with setting the age limit at 18 is that it leads to kids having greater access to alchohol at a much lower age than that- and believe me, I speak from experience, having grown up in New Orleans during the time when the age limit was 18. The vast majority of kids in high school were passing for 18 by the time we were around 15.
By setting the limit at 21, it’s much harder for younger teens to get access to alcohol.
From what I’ve seen and heard from European friends, a lot of the difference in alcohol consumption among kids is just a cultural difference, not a legal one. Since we can’t really legislate any change in that, I prefer (now that I’m a parent
) to have the more restrictive law. I will teach my kids that they can drink responsibly and have no problem with them having small amounts of wine and beer during their adolescent years while under our supervision, but I think it’s best to have the more stringent legal restrictions in place.
Another important distinction is that most teens in the US are going to be driving to and from parties while many places in Europe have public transportation, so that becomes an important factor- it’s not just about keeping alcohol away from kids so that they won’t become alcoholics, it’s a safety issue when they’re at an age where they’re judgment isn’t mature enough to make responsible decisions about drinking and driving.
From what I have heard, this is not actually the case. The reason is an unforeseen side-effect. What happens is that younger teens who want alcohol obtain it by inviting older people to their parties (21+). What this results in is a mixture of young teens, older people in their 20s, and alcohol. Wanna guess what happens then?
I don’t know, Jason, I find it hard to believe that that happens frequently. I’m sure it does at times, but college aged kids generally aren’t going to go hang out with high school sophomores.
I’ll admit though that I’ve recently seen that things are changing, and not for the better- there’s apparently been a lot more mixing of older high school kids and middle school kids, and it takes on a very predatory nature with regard to ‘romantic’ relationships between the older guys and the young girls. So I’ll admit that you could be right and perhaps that’s another development that’s come about in recent years.
The matter of concern I have heard about regarding exploitation ancillary to alcohol provision wasn’t regarding college kids, but men somewhat older than that who knowingly use the younger teens’ desire for alcohol as a device to gain access and leverage over their intended victims.
I don’t know how prevalent it is either, but any such tool for predators is worthy of concern and measures to limit its usefulness. Is lowering the drinking age an answer? Probably not by itself. But I think we need to rethink the entire process of alcohol regulation in this country. I think the status quo produces far more problems than it solves.
From personal experience, the age limit makes it slightly harder to get alcohol in highschool. Not at all for college kids, because they have friends who are 21+. I’d say 90% of the time in high school we wanted alcohol we could find it, from a brother, or a ’shoulder tap’ (asking some random guy on the street) but then again, my friends and I weren’t looking to get drunk every weekend or anything. Reducing the age to 18 would probably lead to at least a temporary hike in highschool drinking, but I really doubt it would have any long term effect.
I’m just not sure that making a drug harder to get actually is actually really all that meaningful in the long run. If anything, it probably encourages bing behavior. If you don’t know when you’ll get alcohol again, you might as well drink up now!
Really, however, the law seems almost superfulous. Take a look at France and Australia. They both have more ‘liberal’ drinking laws than the US, France has a healthier relationship with alcohol than us, while Australia is riddled with binge drinking and drunk driving.
I believe that lowering the legal drinking age to 18 would not be that bad of an idea. If we all take a look around there are plenty of reasons to keep it at 21, but on the other hand there are plenty of reasons to lower it. The soliciting of alcohol to minors (20 and under) would decress and the police would have less to worry about in that area of thier jobs. Tax payers would get more for thier money out of the use of police, we would actually pay for them to do more importaint things like keeping us safe from murderers and other people who are a real threat. Now a days if an adolecnt wants an alcoholic drink, believe me they’ll get it one way or another. Whether its steeling it from the parents or presenting fake IDs or even having older people buy it from them. As a parent myself I have watched my child make mistakes (some really bad) but I know that if she chooses to drink she will do so responsibly because that is the way I have raised her. I believe that parents who are worried she consider that if the child drinks and behaive irresponsibly then it is also the fault of the parent for not rearing the child properly earlier on in their life when learning diciplince was most crucial.
I’m not sure the current age is relevant any longer, and I’ll tell you why.
Almost every package store person I see/talk to now a days will card anyone who doesn’t look like they’re over 35. You don’t have an ID with you and you look under 35? Tough luck.
This isn’t 30 years ago. Owners of package stores are more proactive now because they know they’ll be in trouble if they’re not and someone slips by.
18-20 year old college kids can already get alcohol with almost absurd ease. Just make friends with a 21-year old. I’m not sure what the stats on high school kids getting it is, but at least around here, it doesn’t seem that inredibly difficult, either.
So, now that we have package stores that are actively interested in keeping under-agers out, the age probably makes little sense. As for the "they have to drive" argument, I also think times have changed. More kids are getting educated at earlier ages about the effects of alcohol and the consequences of drinking and driving. I know I first started learning about this stuff in like 6th or 8th grade. PSAs from the Ad Council run continuously. In my experience, my college required me to complete an online course about alcohol before I could register for the second semester of my classes.
The education is plentiful these days, and if it’s not there in some state/district, I’d wonder why state and/or federal officials are allowing that to be so. So, after all this wonderful education, if kids do drink and drive, well, it’s because they decided to, not because the drinking age is 18. If you ask me, 21 isn’t some magical number that makes all the idiocy associated with drunkeness go away.
So, the liquor stores check IDs on visually appearing under-35s, and the education system has completely pounded the message into our brains by age 18.
Is there any true argument left for why the age is 21
I am all for lowering the drinking age. I am a believer that 18 is the appropriate age to allow someone, legally an adult, to drink. However, the only fear I have, and I assume I am not the only one, is that a dramatic drop from 21 to 18 years will cause a dangerous spike in drinking due to its novelty. So, why not create a plan where over the course of 9 years, the drinking age drops 1 year every three years? I imagine that a slow acclimation of the public to a lower drinking age will prove less jarring. I can’t imagine that that many 20 years olds will go berserk when that first year is knocked off. Can you?