Straight Talk About Alcohol

I got all my alcohol axperimenting behind me well before I was allowed to drive. By the time I was 21, I was not drinking at all. Then I came to the USA and went with some friends to a dance/bar place and was appalled to see all those 20-and-30-somethings behave childishly the way I did when I was 15. And they were getting drunk on Miller Light! What about appreciation for nice quality drinks?

I strongly suspect that one (not the only, but perhaps most important) contributing factor to the tendency among young people to drink heavily is the fact that drinking alcohol is seen both as a 'forbidden' activity and as a novelty. If one has been drinking since the early teenage years, by the time the late teens are reached, it's not the big deal that it would be if the first real access to alcohol was achieved at the age of 18 or 19.

Wechsler said that 19-year-olds just don't drink responsibly so there is no reason for them to drink, period. "Nineteen-year-olds do not have two beers. When they drink, they drink a lot," he said.

Gah! This is such a pet peeve of mine, and has been since I was, like, 16.

There are plenty of responsible 19-year-old drinkers, all over the world. If *American* 19-year-olds are irresponsible, it's because of the way *American culture* regards alcohol consumption by 19-year-olds. That is, we are not taught how to drink responsibly. (See also the practical effects of "abstinece only" sex ed.)

When I lived in Europe during high school, every year I went to a big Model U.N. conference in the Netherlands, where the legal drinking age was something like 16 (which meant that 14-year-olds could get boozed up at bars which were not too particular about enforcing the drinking age). So, basically, there were hundreds if not thousands of teenagers from all over Western Europe going out to bars every night. The ones who got into the worst trouble were those from American military bases (which means they lived in American culture instead of whatever their local culture was), because all of a sudden they were free to do whatever, with little to no adult supervision, and incentive to sneak around and be irresponsible, because they'd get into trouble if their chaperones/parents found out.

It's not like the 21-year-old drinking age *stops* teenagers from drinking, it just creates circumstances where they do their drinking under the worst possible circumstances.

It's just too easy to paint any reduction in the law as advocating free beer for kindergarteners.

What's wrong with free beer for kindergarteners?

I am all for changing the drinking age to 18. However, I think we should follow the model that Sweden uses; 18 to drink in pubs, clubs, restaurants, and sporting events and 21 to purchase in liquor stores. This attempts to bring drinking into public spaces and prevents drinking behind closed doors.

A follow-up to ocmpoma's and Pam's comments. The abuse of alcohol really does seem to be tied up with how 'forbidden' it is. I spent some time in The Netherlands and the worst abusers were the U.K. folks flying over on EZJet to take advantage of a country where the pubs don't close after ten. The Dutch, at least in Amsterdam, hold a lot of hostility towards them for it, too...

You can vote and, hmmm, join the military and fight for your country. But Godamn it, you'd better not drink.

A 19 year old (from a college town, where drinking laws were enforced relatively tightly) told me that buying narcotics was easier then buying booze, for the under 21s. Genius.

Here's a bit of background on McCardell's experience with this....

I was a freshman at Middlebury in 1986, when Vermont raised the drinking age form 18 to 21. This was before McCardell took over, but he was there at the time. I don't recall the exact figure, but the dollar amount of dorm damage at least doubled from the prior year (and probably more than tripled) and stayed relatively high in the following years.

Why? When students If you can't drink in town or at a frat party, they drink in the dorm. And they drink a lot. And fast. It turns out the pattern is to get drunk quickly and then go out somewhere. But since drinking quickly and in moderation are more or mutually exclusive, you end up with all these blitzed kids with no parties they could get into.

And not to confuse anecdote with evidence, but of my circle of friends, the ones who were grandfathered had the least problems with booze over our four years, and the single person most injured by alcohol was one of the few who didn't make the cut-off.

I'm all for a younger drinking age, or a staggered one as gg says about Sweden. But we might also consider that (as I minimally understand such things) getting a driver's license is more difficult and expensive in many European countries AND they take drunk driving seriously. That combination seems important.

"Wechsler said that 19-year-olds just don't drink responsibly so there is no reason for them to drink, period."

Bah humbug! I learned my lesson at 12, when I tried to literalize the "four glasses of wine" at Passover. The grown-ups cut me off after the second, but I still woke up on Grandma's couch. Thus I learned that I was too big for my other family members to carry home! Since then, I've never gotten falling-down drunk outside of crawling distance from my own bed. (And not often then -- maybe half-a-dozen times in my college years, and not since.)

Part of the problem is with the whole "party culture" in America, but there's another issue to consider: In many American cities, taking away someone's driver's license is tantamount to placing them under house arrest, because you can't get anywhere without driving! (Orlando comes to mind as a particularly noxious example.) Naturally, that makes it pretty difficult to enforce license suspensions or revocations....

Oh yeah, another aspect of the problem: Lawmakers who think that making something illegal automatically makes it nonexistent.

I'd frame the debate in a series of questions:

1) Are 18 year olds mature enough drink responsibly? Answer: Probably not most of them. But see question 5 for my take on this.

2) Does the higher drinking age discourage underage drinking? Answer: Almost certainly not. The only thing that stood between me and a good drunk in college was money; since there were nearly always house parties offering all-you-can-drink for $2 this was a minor issue. I can't remember a time that I had money, wanted alcohol, and failed to get it.

3) Does the higher drinking age drive drinking underground? Certainly, where it is less safe and less well controlled. I don't suggest that people don't get dangerously drunk at bars, but at least there's SOME semblance of control.

4) Does the 21 year law lead to a net increase in safety? Unclear, but to my uneducated mind unlikely. I'm certainly unaware of any evidence that it does.

5) Does the legal inconsistency pose a moral and or policy problem? Absolutely - to echo Adam's point 18 year olds are old enough to get shot at, but aren't trusted with a beer. I am a strong believer in the idea that people (young people in particular) will rise to the level of maturity that is expected of them; if we tell them they can't be trusted with alcohol they'll do their best to prove us right.

I've often argued that American society is suffering from the lack of a coming of age ceremony, something that exists in most cultural traditions. Pick an age, and say to people "ok, you're an adult now and we expect you to act like it." We do this at 18 with the one exception of drinking.

Bardiac #9: I am a filthy European (from the UK) and over my lifetime the public attitude towards drinkdriving has gone from "it's bad luck if you get caught" to viewing drink drivers as carriers of moral leprosy. Some people will still do it, of course, but there is peer pressure against it even amongst the 18-21 crowd. it is true that in the UK, it's a lot easier to use public transport or walk to a pub than it is in much of the US (where I live in the US, the nearest bar is 3ish miles away and it's a lot colder here in Winter than is the UK), of course.

There is something of a weird attitude to booze in this country. The UK attitude to it is also somewhat weird (the ritual overconsumption of alcohol and inedibly spicy curry followed by grueseome headache and worse). The mainland European attitude generally seems pretty sane (apart from those crazy Norwegians).

Also, regarding Wechsler's point about 19 year olds. It seems that he has the opinion that 'two beers' is the epitome of responsible drinking. It seems to me that it might be possible to drink more than two beers without being 'irresponsible'; it would depend on context and, of course, whether you're driving. I think that there is space for some beer consumption somewhere between drinking too much to drive home and drinking too much.

You can vote and, hmmm, join the military and fight for your country. But Godamn it, you'd better not drink.

When Georgia raised the drinking age from 18 to 19 in 1980 (it's now up to 21), the "old enough to die for your country" bit was one of the strongest arguments against it. So the law had a specific exemption for those in the military, i.e., 18-year-old military personnel could legally drink. I don't know if that exemption still exists.