This is not about the drinking age per se, but about the difference between bureaucratic and entrepreneurial minds.
Sometime ago, Broward County, Florida decided that they would prohibit nude dancing where alcohol was served.
Business owners squealed, then thought for a minute, and smiled. They dropped the alcohol, then dropped the age of admission to 18 (from 21) and merrily went about their business with new profits.
I have no idea if that sort of thing is still going on, but it was sure fun to think about.

----------

Something else has occurred to me, illustrated right here on this blog:
Article after article condemns helicopter parenting as producing young adults incapable of responsible behavior. How, then, is it reasonable to say in the same blog that these same people are now magically responsible w/r/t alcohol and other drugs?

Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world.

Sorry, but this didn't start in the 80's. The drinking age was 21 when I was in college in the 60's, and. . . let's just say the binge drinking wasn't limited to frat parties. I would guess that I consumed more total alcohol before turning 21 than in all the years since, put together.

Here, the age is 16 for beer and wine and 18 for hard liquor. But we still have a drug problem.

Related: “Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack & methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” -neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart http://nyti.ms/15yi0Fy

(Been meaning to have him on my show.)

Rex: That varied by state. E.g., Louisiana's drinking age was 18 dating back to 1948 if not earlier. There is an article in Wikipedia summarizing the history by state:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimum_purchase_age_by_state

Between the end of Prohibition and the 26th Amendment (1971) most states set all of the perquisites of adulthood at 21 (voting, making contracts, and drinking), but there were a few that allowed 18 year olds to purchase alcohol - even though they still couldn't vote or sign a contract.

The Vietnam War revived old arguments about the discrepancy between the draft age and the age of majority. Eventually the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, and in 1972 most states followed by lowering the age of majority to 18 in all other respects. (Kansas, which had the drinking age at 18 before, raised it to 21 except for 3.2 beer.) This was followed by many well-publicized fatal crashes by drunken high school seniors and college freshman - I doubt that there was much of an increase in the actual incidence, but there was a lot more publicity - and in a few years many states bumped the age to 19.

Kids continued to drink too much, and MADD arose and lobbied until in 1984 federal highway funds were made contingent on raising the drinking age to 21. Most states complied, a few resisted. Louisiana technically complied, but with loopholes so it was still effectively 18 until 1996. Puerto Rico refused and gave up a bit of highway funding; the drinking age is still 18 there, like it has been ever since Prohibition. Likewise with the nearby Virgin Islands. (What highway funds? None of the Virgin Islands can be much over 10 miles long.) Guam kept it at 18 until 2010.

So the drinking age has been 21 since 1985 for over 90% of Americans. Lo and Behold, both frat boys and townies continue to drink themselves to death.

And you are right that no drinking age has ever prevented high school kids from getting stinking drunk. In the small town in Michigan where I grew up, around 1964, the Mayor's son celebrated his 16th birthday by getting his drivers license, borrowing his Dad's car keys, stealing his Dad's liquor (somehow it didn't matter that he was five years under the drinking age), and demonstrating why we called it "deadman's curve". And in my senior year in high school (1970-71), the drinking age was still 21 and I'm pretty sure none of my classmates were over 21, but a vice principal discovered an empty beer can on a trophy case near his office and flipped out over it in public. Next morning, there was a pyramid of beer cans in the spot. Another over the top public flip-out. Larger pyramids mysteriously appeared until finally he ripped the trophy case from the wall. He was satisfied for a few days, until he happened to look up while coming in from the parking lot. The roof of the building was glittery with all the cans tossed up there, and the janitors refused to climb up on an icy roof to remove them. The persons unknown who were doing this must have been finding the empties in dumpsters, because they couldn't possibly have drunk it all and still been conscious the next morning.

I agree that the legal age ought to be lowered to 18. When my nephew was in the Air Force, and I took him out to dinner to celebrate his getting a promotion, I found it embarrassing and insulting that I couldn't order a glass of wine for him even though he had signed up to potentially die for his country.

"Related: “Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack & methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” -neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart"

Which, of course, makes those things totally OK and part of a wholesome American life of work and family.

Really? Out of a hundred people in your neighborhood, it's OK with you that 10-20 of them become addicts!?

Related to my earlier post: if these people 18-21 are responsible, why is it they do not use that power of the vote to lower the legal limits for themselves?

@ Radwaste: "Something else has occurred to me, illustrated right here on this blog: Article after article condemns helicopter parenting as producing young adults incapable of responsible behavior. How, then, is it reasonable to say in the same blog that these same people are now magically responsible w/r/t alcohol and other drugs?"

You answered your own question. Nanny state/helicopter parenting inhibits young people from developing responsible behavior. That's sort of the point of Amy's essay today.

Canvasback - now, examine cause and effect. "Helicopter parenting" isn't stopped by approving alcohol and magically getting responsible youth. This is the identical, totally unsupported reasoning offered on this blog that claims drug legalization magically confers responsibility upon drug users - who are simply not demonstrating anything of the sort at the moment.

When Europe is cited as a role model in alcohol in the home, mention of the completely different home life and social environment is avoided - as is the use of alcohol in Russia, which has problems which would put MADD in the hospital just thinking about it.

Which, taken to its logical conclusion, leads us back to prohibition. I'll run my life, thank you.

I'm an addict form a long line of addicts. I dont use anything. I go out of my way to make my doctors give me non narcotic pain scripts just to be on the safe side

I also grew up in Utah surrounded my mormons who even at 15 yrs old were getting hit faced drunk at parties.

And yet I'm not irresponsible when it comes to drugs.

When to comes arbitrarily illegal substances Rad your rationality goes straight out the window

@Radwaste: Out of a hundred people in your neighborhood, it's OK with you that 10-20 of them become addicts!?

1. For my neighborhood to contain 100 people who use crack or meth, or would if those were legal, you'd have to define "neighborhood" very broadly. If 10-20 of the nearest 100 users were addicts. . . yeah, I'm OK with that. I'd probably never run into any of them.

2. I'm a hell of a lot more OK with it than I am with putting all 100 in jail to prevent addiction.

(I say all this as someone who has had close personal experience with a meth addict.)

"Really? Out of a hundred people in your neighborhood, it's OK with you that 10-20 of them become addicts!?" Don't care. However if I did what would you propose to do to fix it? Drug war is an abject failure and a very expensive one.

"It's none of my business."

The trouble is, a lot of those meth addicts will make it your business. They'll dip into your tax money with Medicaid and SSI claims for their meth-enabled "disabilities". They'll break into your house and steal your stuff to pay for their fix. They'll drive down the wrong side of the road in a meth haze and crash into your car. They'll set up dangerous meth labs in your neighborhood. And if you have one in your family, they'll be on the phone with you ten times a day wanting to "borrow" money or wanting you to come rescue them from whatever calamity they've gotten themselves into in the past hour.

One of the things we have to be upfront with regarding drug legalization is that not all drug abuse is the same. It's long been known that amphetamine abuse correlates with a whole bunch of other social pathologies. After all, the slogan "Speed kills" wasn't invented by uptight old white Republicans -- it came straight from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

If we are talking about health consequences regarding drugs we all know the biggest health issue right now is obesity.

Heart attacks (isn't it like the #1 killer?), diabetes, etc. are all caused by sugar.

I think sugar is addicting. Plus we subsidize the shit out of corn, wheat and HFS.

Everyone is fat, including kids. So why not ban sodas, happy meals and hot Cheetos ?

I mean if the reason you are against drugs is because of health and addiction it looks to me that sugar is an even bigger more expensive monster.

@Cousin Dave:
They'll dip into your tax money with Medicaid and SSI claims for their meth-enabled "disabilities".

That's on the people who make the rules for Medicaid and SSI; no reason they can't exclude addicts from receiving payment. (Or better yet, end those sinkhole programs entirely, but that's another rant.)

They'll break into your house and steal your stuff to pay for their fix.

They'll steal a lot less to pay for a legal fix than an illegal one. Surely this isn't the first time--or the thousandth--that this has been pointed out to you.

They'll drive down the wrong side of the road in a meth haze and crash into your car.

For 80 years, drinking has been legal but driving drunk has not. Why is it so difficult to imagine the same treatment for drugs/drugged driving?

They'll set up dangerous meth labs in your neighborhood.

They're a lot less likely to do this if it's legal for them to go to a non-residential area and set up a lab with safeguards in place which confine the danger to the lab itself.

if you have one in your family, they'll be on the phone with you ten times a day wanting to "borrow" money or wanting you to come rescue them from whatever calamity they've gotten themselves into in the past hour.

I do have one in my family (see my previous post). It cost us more when he was in jail than when he was out.

Wow. Just wow. More claims that legalization magically leads to responsible behavior by drug addicts. Wow.

I sure wish at least one other person on here would learn about fallacies.

More claims that legalization magically leads to responsible behavior by drug addicts.

You're going to have to connect the dots on that one, Rad. I see nothing here since your 7:26 AM post which makes such a claim.

>> More claims that legalization magically leads to responsible behavior by drug addicts. Wow.

Is that what you see? I see people pointing out that the things you are worried about are exacerbated by the drugs being illegal, which seems to be the opposite of what you are trying to argue.

Steve Chapman brings up some interesting points in this defense of keeping the higher drinking age.

http://reason.com/archives/2008/08/21/the-perils-of-a-lower-drinking

The main issue I have with the drinking age isn't the age itself, but the plethora of differing benchmarks for 'adulthood'.

Someone can be tried as an adult well before turning 21 (for some crimes).

Someone can join the armed services, meet people in strange and wondrous lands, and kill them, at 18 years of age.

They can get married and produce a child (that they often can't actually support on their own), well before becoming 21 years of age.

This is entirely bound to create conflicts in behaviour in people of that age. They're expected to be responsible for x, but can't be trusted with y.

That's pretty fucking foolish, if you ask me.

They're either an adult, or they're not. If they are, then they get to make their own decisions, if not, we don't get to use them as soldiers, and they can't be married or parents.

And Radwaste:

"More claims that legalization magically leads to responsible behavior by drug addicts. Wow."

For someone who often posts intelligent and well thought out comments, this is really one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever seen you utter.

First off, as others have mentioned, nobody here is claiming that magical property of legalization.

Second, getting rid of the laws against some drugs is *not* going to make everyone an addict, any more than repealing prohibition made everyone an alcoholic.

The vast majority of people who don't use drugs aren't going to be ambushed by a joint if it happens to become legal.

And the vast majority of those who are going to be irresponsible with drugs are *already* irresponsible with them. They don't care about the legality, one way or the other.

At most, there's a handful of people on the boundary between those two extremes, and some of them might not make the best decisions.

And that's still not a good argument for keeping them illegal.

It is a simple, and empirically evident fact: The harms of prohibition are categorically greater than the harms of the drugs.

Black market, increased militarizaion of the police, corruption in the agencies tasked with upholding prohibition, the unequal enforcement of drug laws (Bush and Obama get a pass, but average joe gets a prison sentence).

I don't see anyone here claiming that it's a good idea to nose dive into a pile of cocaine and marijuana.

But, the drug laws themselves, and the police state needed to even attempt to enforce them, are vastly worse than any harm the drugs themselves can do, especially given, that those very laws are utterly ineffectual at preventing their use in the first place.

"It's none of my business."

That is so true. Until I cause injury to you and yours it is not any of your business. I should be able to be as stupid or as smart as I want to be. That applies to intoxicants, firearms, animals/pets, religion, speech, and so many other things.

The trouble is, a lot of those meth addicts will make it your business. ... They'll set up dangerous meth labs in your neighborhood.

Please show me the last time the revenooers busted an illegal distillery? Basically once prohibition ended the profit and incentive went out of making your own.

The same is going to happen in Colorado and Washington state with pot.

There will still be the person who grows his preferred pot, just like there are the guys who make their own craft beer or the rarer still moonshine or wine. Do you think there will still be meth labs if you can go to CVS, Wal-mart or even a state store to buy it?

And if you have one in your family, they'll be on the phone with you ten times a day wanting to "borrow" money or wanting you to come rescue them from whatever calamity they've gotten themselves into in the past hour.

Show me a family that doesn't have a person that is (was) dysfunctional in it, in some form or fashion, and I'll give them the key to Emerald City. How you and the family handles it again comes back to yours and their personal decisions. That means letting them fail, or helping them out is a choice that you get to make. It isn't a government choice.

H.L. Mencken was right; the average person doesn't want to be free. Most of us are not the calibre of the founding fathers, who placed such a high value on individual liberties. The average person wants to be safe, and would willingly sacrifice personal freedom for personal safety.

This is why we willingly accepted the raising of the drinking age. Because we were enthralled by the numbers that showed that raising the drinking age cut down on accidents caused by drunken driving. In my homestate (Vermont), governor Dick Snelling lost his bid for reelection, largely due to the fact that he refused to raise the drinking age in Vermont.

We're forever trying to walk the line between individual liberties and the collective welfare. It's easy to see people on the other side of that line as mentally deficient or lacking in character.

The thing is, both Amy and Radwaste are right. Letting people enter into legally binding contracts at 18 but denying them a beer is bizarre. On the other hand, drug addicts WILL wreck your neighborhood, and possibly your life. There are no easy answers.

Most of us are not the calibre of the founding fathers, who placed such a high value on individual liberties.

Let's not suck too much Founding Father cock here. They were all about individual liberties for land-owning white men.

People (women and drag queens) who apply mascara in motor vehicles are a danger to all of us.

Not the same thing. While I think most drugs should be legal and the drinking age should be lowered to 18, women applying mascara can toss the tube and drive. You can't sober up with a snap of your fingers. And we can ban applying makeup in a moving vehicle if we want, but there's no way to test for it. Alcohol and drugs are easy.

"On the other hand, drug addicts WILL wreck your neighborhood, and possibly your life. There are no easy answers."

Making drugs either legal or illegal won't alter that fact at all. The ones who let it get that far simply don't (or won't be bothered to) care. There are other laws that can be applied to address those kind of negative effects, in exactly the same way that it's illegal to steal from your neighbor whether you're doing it for drugs or to score an iPad.

I'm not in favor of repealing the 'war on some drugs' because I think people should be using them.

I'm in favor of repealing them because they don't address what they claim to address, and as a matter of fact, they make things worse overall.

Growing up I lived next to tons of drug users.

But they were white, rich, good looking and their parents had connections. So nobody cared.

They'll set up dangerous meth labs in your neighborhood.

They're a lot less likely to do this if it's legal for them to go to a non-residential area and set up a lab with safeguards in place which confine the danger to the lab itself.

They're a lot less likey to do it if Pizer sets up the lab and they can buy a weeks work at Walgreens for half the cost of the raw fucking ingredents

Steve Chapman brings up some interesting points in this defense of keeping the higher drinking age.

Those arguments cold just as easily be used to deny 18yr old the right to credit cards, and contracts, and the right of 65 yr old and older the right to vote.
Age of Majority in America

8yrs old, being charged for sexual assault, if your a male and your babysitter molested you

11yrs old, murder charges, if male

13yrs old, rape, if male (cant find a single case of a woman under 30 being charged with non statutory rape by herself)

15yrs old, murder charges, if female

18yrs old, contracts, marriage, cigarettes

21yrs old, booze

26yrs old, no longer a child per federal insurance guidelines

Never, anything the government deems to harmful for you

Be proud.

"Be proud."

Dude.

That's like Discovery Institute level of cognitive dissonance there.

Plus, it's CNN, the down's syndrome of the 24 hour news feeds.

Making pot legal didn't cause that particular issue, and making it illegal didn't prevent it (that kind of thing happens even where it's illegal, and you know it).

When you post about drugs, you say some of the stupidest things I've seen on the internet, and I've read 4chan (unfortunately).

Be proud. -- Radwaste at April 25, 2014 12:28 PM

I have to agree with Tim about your cognitive dissonance.

I was 15 in rural PA that I got away with sampling alcohol in quantity. I think that was the same year I sampled cigarettes. My mother isn't a smoker. (And father wasn't in the house.)

Put simply prohibition has always failed.

There has been prohibition about homosexuality in the bible since before Jesus was a glimmer in anyone's eye. Why does it occur today?

Chicago, IL has practically prohibited firearms for about 40+ years. They still have the highest murder rate of any U.S. city including by firearms.

There has been prohibition about many other issues besides drugs and alcohol. They don't work.

Once you grasp that concept about prohibition then you can start working forward to come up with standards for your industry and your community. Taking liberty and freedom from people is not the answer.

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