Repeal The Fed Extortion That Is The National Drinking Age
In 1984, President Reagan signed the Uniform Drinking Age Act, requiring states to make 21 the minimum age for purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages -- or lose 10 percent of their federal highway funding (later amended to eight percent).
I'm at the big social psych conference, SPSP, in San Diego, and at dinner, we were talking about groups and how Michael Jordan and others who've retired from sports or the military seem to miss the group they were a part of -- the group that was previously so much a part of their lives.
I mentioned how we're social animals and evolved in small bands -- and seem to need this "group-i-ness." It's something we often lack in the way we live in these vast, transient societies -- too big for our brains, as I point out in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck." (Why get to know the neighbors; in six months, they'll move again.)
Well, I suspect a psychological need to be part of a group may be a big reason people join frats and sororities. But I think another big reason is the drinking.
Via Overlawyered, Jeffrey A. Tucker writes at the Foundation for Economic Education:
Being able to drink with friends, and unhampered by authority, is a major appeal of the Greek system on campus. It's a way to get around the preposterously high drinking age. Getting around this law will consume a major part of the energy and creativity of these kids for the next three years.As for everyone else who cannot afford to join, it's all about a life of sneaking around, getting to know older friends, lying and hiding, pregaming before parties just in case there is no liquor there, and generally adopting a life of bingeing and purging, blackouts and hangovers, rising and repeating. And so on it goes for years until finally the dawn of what the state considers adulthood.
For an entire class of people, it's the Roaring Twenties all over again.
It's all part of Prohibition's legacy and a reflection of this country's strange attitudes toward drinking in general. The drinking age in the United States (21), adopted in 1984, is one of the highest in the world. Countries that compare in severity are only a few, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan.
Most of the rest of the world has settled on 18 for liquor and 16 for beer and wine. In practice, most European countries have very low enforcement of even that. Somehow it works just fine for them.
...People speak of a rape crisis on campus, and whatever the scope of the problem, the fact that women under 21 must retreat to dorm rooms and frat houses to drink puts them all in a vulnerable situation. It's hard to imagine that consent is really there when people are falling down, passing out, and feeling mortified the next day about what happened. In fact, the law represents a true danger to women in particular because it prohibits legal access to safe public places to drink responsibly, and go home to a safe environment afterward.
There is an organization of college administrators who are fed up. It is called the Amethyst Initiative. Currently, 135 colleges have signed support for a lower drinking age. Their goal is not to encourage more drinking but to recognize the unreality of the current law, and how it has led to perverse consequences on campus.
...Current drinking-age law is unenforceable and destructive. The reality is that kids are going to drink. Denying that and imposing ever more draconian punishments doesn't fix the real problems with alcohol.
What we need is a normal environment of parental and community supervision so that such drinking can occur in a responsible way. Yes, kids will probably drink more often, and yes, more kids will probably try alcohol, but they can do so in an environment of safety and responsibility.
As I did. I've written a number of times about how alcohol wasn't a big deal to me because, while my mother wasn't pouring us wine at every meal, we could have had some on Jewish holidays or had tastes of whatever my dad was drinking.
When I wanted to experiment with alcohol, I got the clever idea of doing it while my parents were there. I got drunk at my cousin's wedding, threw up on the way home, and had my dad laugh at me. Not yell at me. Not ground me. He thought it was hilarious that I had a hard lesson with liquor.
Not having it forbidden made it far less exciting to me than other kids I knew, and I barely drank during college.
That's also what I see of a number of my French friends and other European friends who were raised similarly.
Not everybody is going to deal well with this, and not everybody does in Europe. But pre-punishing the majority -- I think -- is more hurtful and dangerous.
Sadly, it's not going to happen and whoever advocates it publicly is going to get tag-teamed by MADD and Radical Feminists on live TV.
Sixclaws at January 28, 2016 9:09 PM
So, by increasing the lawful supply, we will get LESS use of alcohol?
Funny how drugs are claimed to disobey one of the laws of supply and demand: the one that says restrictions on the supply leads to less use, despite increase in demand.
For alcohol, the claim is implied that Americans drink less now than during prohibition...
Radwaste at January 29, 2016 2:23 AM
Who says LESS use of booze? I'm thinking same quantities but a more responsible use of alcohol by a group of people who see it as forbidden fruit and thus over indulge.
I just do not see such a disgusting gluttonous consumption of alcohol in other countries by young people. They still drink a lot --sometimes more---but they're taught to hold their liquor without that frat boy mentality that plagues under age drinkers here.
In my family (and I come from a long line of alcoholics) booze was easily accessible and the only young men who had issues with it were gonna have issues anyways. A good stint in the Marines, Navy, Army cured each of them along with a nice wife. And the ones that were never cured had other demons that had nothing to do with booze itself.
Ppen at January 29, 2016 4:40 AM
I don't think binge drinking has anything to do w/alcohol but is an experiment first and then a way to hide from reality. For some this opens Pandora's box (addiction, denial, self-hate, etc.).
Purchase age is not an issue because these 'kids' are not buying alcohol but are getting it "free".
The ability to hide in a group is the attraction not the drinking.
(Also, if a college town wanted to solve abusive drinking that happens in a few buildings I think they could.)
Bob in Texas at January 29, 2016 6:10 AM
18-year-old citizens should have full civil rights
tmitsss at January 29, 2016 6:40 AM
"I just do not see such a disgusting gluttonous consumption of alcohol in other countries by young people. "
It's this: any time that a resource that is normally scarce, but suddenly becomes available for a short period of time, people will rush to get it and then either binge or hoard it. You see it when people who are perpetually broke win a lottery jackpot. You saw it in the Soviet Union whenever grocery stores (whose shelves were normally near-empty) got a big delivery of anything; people would line up to get as much as possible as quickly as possible, without regard as to what they were actually going to do with it. I saw a lot of it in the early '90s when mortgage interest rates came down to unprecedented levels; all of a sudden, people who normally hadn't considered home ownership were in a big rush to buy a house and get a rate locked in, because of the perception at the time that the extremely low rates wouldn't last long. (Little did we know...) This was coming off of the 1970s and '80s when loan interest rates were generally north of 10%, so 3.5% was like manna from heaven. Grab it while it's available today, and tomorrow worry about what to do with it.
This is the case with alcohol for college students. It's normally not available. Under cover of a student party of some kind, it becomes plentiful for a short period of time. There's no way to hoard it; you can't go to the party and fill up jugs and take them back to your dorm room. So, binge. Now, imagine a world where the college student can legally buy a beer at the student center and drink it while he does his homework. Suddenly, the Saturday night binge isn't all that attractive; the resource isn't that scarce and so the hoarding motivation isn't there. Yes, our student might go to a frat party and get pretty drunk, but probably not to the passing out or throwing up stage. (If he does, he probably won't do it again because it is not a pleasant experience for most people.) More likely he'll drink some beer or a mixed drink or two over several hours, shoot some lawn pool on the lawn in front of the frat house, watch some of the soft-core porn movie that's playing on the house TV, and then maybe try to find a pretty young thing who might be interested in making out with him.
How do I know this? Because I lived it. Among the depredations of coming of age during the Carter era, there was one bright spot: the drinking age was 19 where I lived. As a college freshman, my dad and I went out to dinner and drank together. Me and my roommates kept a six-pack in the fridge (when we had the money to buy one), and sometimes we'd swing by after class, grab one, and then take it over to the student center and drink while we did some homework or played video games. (Technically, there wasn't supposed to be alcohol in the student center, but they would look the other way as long as no one caused trouble.) Were they binge drinkers on campus? A few. They were viewed by the other students as pathetic and in need of help. Most of them dropped out pretty quickly. There was none of the widespread, every-weekend binge drinking that you see at universities today.
Cousin Dave at January 29, 2016 6:45 AM
You are an adult with the responsibilities and privileges of an adult, or you are a child. Want the drinking age to be 21? The voting age should match.
MarkD at January 29, 2016 7:24 AM
Steve Chapman brought up some interesting points in Reason in defense of a higher drinking age:
"Another reason is that extending the vote to 18-year-olds doesn't let even younger people gain illicit access to the polls. But if high-school seniors could legally patronize a liquor store, sophomores would find it much easier to get party fuel. Raising the drinking age to 21 reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities not only among 18-year-olds, who lost the right to drink, but 16-year-olds, who never had it."
http://reason.com/archives/2008/08/21/the-perils-of-a-lower-drinking
Although, he does resort to that time-worn shibboleth of traffic fatalities - as if restricting drinking will reduce the number of people willing to drive drunk on illicitly obtained alcohol - his points are still worth considering in any debate over changing the drinking age.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 8:08 AM
18-year-old citizens should have full civil rights
Ordinarily, I'd say ✔ but with the "Affordable Care Act" redefining "child" to be anyone under 26...
The voting age should match.
✔ Of course, that would raise merry hob with enlisting in the military, getting married, or obtaining credit.
Maybe 26 is the proper age of majority these days? In the ye olde days, 18 was adequate because nobody even the uber rich considered themselves special little snowflakes and by the time you got to 18 you'd seen more than a little bit of the ugly side of life.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 29, 2016 8:12 AM
Ready availability of alcohol does not mean less binge drinking - as Britain has discovered:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/10309607/Britain-has-a-drinking-problem-and-it-needs-help.html
"Pubs, with their social checks and balances, are closing at the rate of 26 per week. But that does not mean less drink: cheap deals even in petrol stations, an explosion in wine-drinking ... have seen to that."
It used to be that foreign locales dreaded American tourists. Now, the positively love them compared to British tourists.
Some limitation must be placed on alcohol consumption. The question is what kind of limitation, social opprobrium for over-consumption or legal restriction on consumption. I favor the social kind, but we'll need a mature society for that to work.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 8:17 AM
More from Chapman on that:
"There are other arguments for lowering the age. Maybe the most popular is that if you're old enough to join the Army and die for your country, you're old enough to buy a beer. But there is a good reason to avoid such blind consistency. Among the qualities that make 18-year-olds such good soldiers are their fearlessness and sense of immortality—traits that do not mix well with alcohol."
"Besides, we don't have a single age threshold for adulthood. We give driver's licenses to 16-year-olds, but a 20-year-old Marine returning from Iraq will find he may not buy a handgun or gamble in a casino. Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders."
[Emphases mine]
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 8:24 AM
Although, one could argue that since those 18-year-olds voted overwhelmingly for Obama, that argument is null and void.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 8:26 AM
I'm not sure why you see a conflict Rad. With a larger supply you will see higher consumption but lower instantaneous consumption. I.e. the drinking gets spread out over time. As Cousin Dave pointed out there is elasticity to both supply and demand. When a large volume of product is brought on the market it takes time for demand to react. So supply spikes don't significantly affect demand.
The oil industry suffers from this as well. Demand for crude oil is amazingly inelastic. There are few alternatives so people will pay almost any price to get what they need. Supply is similarly inelastic. It takes ~5 years to develop a new resource. So by the time demand is high enough for a resource to be profitable to exploit there is a 5 year time delay to add to the supply. Hence many projects are started in parallel and finish around the same time leading to an oversupply and resulting drop in price. A further inelasticity, most projects are debt financed. So even when production at a finished well is not profitable people will still sell the oil to make something to pay the debt on the well.
Hence the classic 5 year boom/bust cycle in the oil industry. Demand and supply take time to react.
Ben at January 29, 2016 8:43 AM
I think Ppen nailed it pretty well.
What we need, I suspect, especially in the U.S., is for parents to be much more casual about drinking in the home, at dinner - so long as a parent is present and teens from outside the family are NOT present. This would make it seem at least somewhat less like forbidden fruit than before. (Of course, there are still religious families that forbid it - Baptists, Mormons and Muslims, for starters.)
In the meantime, as I've mentioned, the trouble with keeping the driving age at 16 (whether we're also talking about the drinking age or not) is that driving laws were written about a century ago. (Plenty of states had no driving laws at all in the pre-WWI years.) What's the problem? Namely, neither cars nor roads allowed for high speeds back then, and teens, especially, weren't given free reign to drive around for fun and waste precious gas money, as opposed to going on important errands for their parents (as in farming communities). Thus, had we had the same conditions a century ago that we have today, the driving age would very likely be at least 18, if not higher, when you think about it.
In the same vein, we didn't used to have child labor laws or mandatory schooling laws, but there were obviously very good reasons for that to change. Why not change the driving age too? Take a look at the fatality rates for teens sometime, even when they're driving sober. If driving deaths are now lower than #5 on the list of causes of death for teens, I'll be very surprised. (Mind you, that's when a teen is DRIVING, not when a teen is riding with an adult driver.)
lenona at January 29, 2016 9:36 AM
OK, found it. It's from 2010. Main surprise: There's no mention of drugs or alcohol on this page. Granted, they don't make it clear who's likely to be driving either.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db37.htm
Quote:
•An average of 16,375 teenagers 12-19 years died in the United States every year from 1999 to 2006. This is less than 1 percent of all deaths that occur every year in the United States.
•The five leading causes of death among teenagers are Accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide, cancer, and heart disease. Accidents account for nearly one-half of all teenage deaths.
•As a category of accidents, motor vehicle fatality is the leading cause of death to teenagers, representing over one-third of all deaths.
•Among teenagers, non-Hispanic black males have the highest death rate (94.1 deaths per 100,000 population).
•Homicide is the leading cause of death for non-Hispanic black male teenagers. For all other groups, accident is the leading cause.
lenona at January 29, 2016 9:44 AM
I'd argue to LOWER the driving age.
With automatic transmissions and power steering you dont need any upper body strength.
Teach kids to drive BEFORE the hormones turn them into moronic showoffs.
And quite frankly teenagers dying is a GOOD THING for the species, it means they wont pass on their brain dead genes to the next generation
lujlp at January 29, 2016 10:08 AM
I could argue to lower the drinking age below the driving age. Learn how to handle yourself drinking before you learn how to drive.
That would also mean teenagers wouldn't have to drive (sneak) away from the house to drink.
But, science has shown us that alcohol does damage to a 14-year-old brain, so that idea won't fly.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 10:17 AM
"Raising the drinking age to 21 reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities not only among 18-year-olds, who lost the right to drink, but 16-year-olds, who never had it."
I'd have to go take a good look at the data. It may have reduced alcohol-related deaths, but if it didn't reduce deaths among that age group overall, then did it really help? Further, traffic fatality rates across all demographics have been trending downwards since the 1980s, because the cars and roads have gotten safer. That effect would have to be isolated in order to get an answer.
"The five leading causes of death among teenagers are Accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide, cancer, and heart disease. Accidents account for nearly one-half of all teenage deaths."
That's not much of a surprise, though. Top causes of teenage deaths have been accidents and intentional death (murder and suicide) since well before the advent of the automobile. For the simple reason that the health problems that account for many deaths in older age groups are very uncommon in teenagers.
" The question is what kind of limitation, social opprobrium for over-consumption or legal restriction on consumption. "
It would have to be social. We already tried the legal route; it didn't work and it had huge negative effects (e.g., the rise of organized crime and consequent acquisition of power by the federal government). Remember what I said about the binge drinkers on campus being viewed by the other students as pitiful? And I'll repeat what I said about being passed-out or throwing-up drunk being an undesirable experience for most people. If an increasing number of people are doing that, it must be because they are using the experience to mentally escape from something that is even more unpleasant. Heavy drinking in the Soviet Union then; heavy drinking in Great Britain now. What they have in common is that many people see or saw no future for themselves, and no future for the people they love and the society they live in. Under those conditions it's no surprise that you get a lot of binge drinking. People need something to live for. Our college binge drinkers today? A lot of them are going to graduate with un-repayable student loans and a worthless degree with no job prospects.
Cousin Dave at January 29, 2016 10:50 AM
And quite frankly teenagers dying is a GOOD THING for the species, it means they wont pass on their brain dead genes to the next generation
It seems mixing motor fuel with Mountain Dew is au courant among the idiot-teen set in Tennessee (you can Google up the stories). A bit of bleach for the gene pool.
Kevin at January 29, 2016 11:08 AM
I would (and did) agree.
Not to mention, little price to be paid for spending their college years stewed.
Most coursework in today's colleges could be done half plowed and still receive a passing grade.
We need to start taking higher education (and vocational training) seriously - and not as an extension of high school.
Let's go back to college as "four years prostrate to the higher mind" and not four years of partying and debauchery.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 11:19 AM
"Sadly, it's not going to happen and whoever advocates it publicly is going to get tag-teamed by MADD and Radical Feminists on live TV."
Damn that feminist Reagan and his feminist agenda!
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 29, 2016 11:59 AM
Oh please, we all know Reagan was a senile puppet
lujlp at January 29, 2016 3:05 PM
Another example of some dumb teenagers do something stupid and the news media reports it as a trend and everyone panics and the government must do something, because "think of the children!"
http://reason.com/blog/2016/01/28/dewshine-a-new-dumb-teen-drug-panic
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2016 3:10 PM
I don't really care what the drinking age, voting age, or driving age in this country is, I just wish law enforcement didn't spend so much time using these petty laws as a revenue generation machine.
Selective enforcement is also a big problem. When is the last time you heard about an underage/non citizen Election Day sting?
And then police run them for booze,cigarettes, drugs, and minor non accident traffic violations all the time.
Japan has decided not to waste their time and money on bloated police departments issuing tickets, and running stings. It, in many respects, a much nicer country because of it.
In the US it is like law enforcement is a super thuggish and vigilant HOA. More interested in finding people for not cutting their grass, than dealing with real crime.
Isab at January 30, 2016 6:47 AM
Leave a comment