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A group of chancellors and presidents universities and college are asking lawmakers to think about lowering the drinking age from 21 years to 18 years. The Amethyst Initiative, started by former Middlebury College president John McCardell and now boasts 114 signatures from other college officials (like NY schools Colgate University, Hamilton College, Manhattan College and Manhattanville College), says, "These higher education leaders have signed their names to a public statement that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses." The group also points out "while adults under 21 can vote and enlist in the military, they are told they are not mature enough to have a beer." However, some organizations think lowering the drinking age will just mean more drunk driving incidents; a Harvard School of Public Health lecturer also said lowering the legal age to drink is like "pouring gasoline to put the fire out."
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some organizations think lowering the drinking age will just mean more drunk driving incidents
Sounds to me like the problem is driving, not drinking.
Yay! People thinking. Yay!
Well, duh. Anyone with half a brain knows that banning something makes it more likely for people to misuse it. Unfortunately, the morons at MADD etc will spend every penny they have to pay off politicians to keep the drinking age at 21. Because, like, when they talked Reagan into changing the drinking age nationwide (nevermind states rights who cares about them?) every problem related to underage drinking was solved! We haven't had any problems since, thanks to Reagan's genius!
Oh wait...
Yeah my mom grew up in Michigan in the 70's and she drank at 18. When I was 18 she mocked me and told me all about how she would go to drunken parties at 18. Damn her.
They should raise the legal age to 25 seriously.
We will end up being like those damn drunken canadians!
WHO WANTS THAT! THOSE CANADIANS ARE CRAZY!
The legal drinking age here in the UK is 18, and frankly I see very little benefit for it... Sure, having it be 21 means people wanting to drink have to wait a few more years but I think that at least means they're a bit more mature enough to make such a decision then if they were 18.
Let's have more 'ABSURDIST LOGIC' - let us allow 12 years-olds to drive automobiles becacause there are too many accidents/fatalities!!! 'College Administrators' drunk on their own nuanced/thoughtful intelligence!!!
I would have ranked this near the bottom in probability of topics to be neatly summed up by blaming Republicans but #3 proved otherwise.
How is that absurdist logic? Seems like a relatively easy thing to study. Before the drinking age was raised to 21, did there exist this culture of binge drinking? If not, maybe there is some correlation there.
Before the drinking age was raised to 21, did there exist this culture of binge drinking?
If you listen to my dad's stories of college in the 1950s there was binge drinking and there was drunk driving as well. People just didn't focus on it back then like MADD did. It isn't that it was acceptable then. It's just that few people talked about it.
Morons at MADD? Are you fucking kidding me? Pull your head out of your ass and go to a MADD meeting. Listen to the fucking brutal stories of stupid underage kids killing each other while driving drunk. I hope they spend every cent they have to contest this moronic initiative.
We should get rid of the age limit all together. Our children are smart enough to make choices and live with the consequences. I've seen 13 year old girls make better 'life' decisions than many of my 30+ year old friends.
The rest of the world its 18 to drink expext for the US and Japan which is 20.
I'd be ok with it if they institute a test, like getting a driver's license.
Fill in the blank: "Liquor before beer, never _____. Beer before liquor, never _______."
Followed by a skills demonstration, such as proper use of a beer bong.
"Morons at MADD"
sorry, but the only morons here are drunk drivers who often seem to survive the fatal accidents that they themselves cause. The victems here (NOT morons) are innocents who are killed and their loved ones who are left to a lifetime of grief. And in some cases, activism; see MADD.
yawn.
On days like this, I almost miss England.
OK, this is stupid. College students don't binge drink because the drinking age is 21 rather than 18. College students binge drink because they're college students and binge drinking is FUN. They actually expect us to believe that college students didn't binge drink when the drinking age was 18? Riiiiight.
And, I mean, I agree with the initiative, because I think the 21-year-old drinking age is ridiculous and paternalistic and absurd in view of the fact that you can get shipped to Iraq at 18. I just think the logic behind this lowering effort is stupid.
And as commenter #1 said, the problem is driving, not drinking. There are tens of thousands of driving-related deaths in the country every year that don't have to do with drinking; how many drinking-related deaths are there that don't involve driving?
So let me try and understand the dumbass logic on display... People are breaking the law, and the law is what is wrong?
How about we raise the driving age to 21 and then lower the drinking age to 18?
in NYC, at least, the problem with the 21 drinking age isn't so much drinking & driving as the huge illegal fake-ID business it stimulates, and the bind this business puts clubs & bars who have to discriminate in. it basically funds an underworld.
considering the drinking age is pretty much universally ignored/gotten around, it probably should be reduced -- in the same way the speed limit should be raised, jaywalking should be legalized etc. etc. universally ignored laws reduce respect for the necessary laws, and, furthermore, distract law enforcement from more urgent tasks.
the law isn't "wrong", but the necessity of law is sickening!
the problem is definitely more driving than drinking, but ultimately retarded people [everyone] should just stop procreating and we wouldn't have any of this nonsense.
i'm now looking forward to our impending doom. three cheers for armageddon!
Another thing I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion is the fact that because it's harder to get alcohol when you're underage, people are more likely to drink hard alcohol because it's easier to have someone buy them a couple giant bottles of hard liquor as opposed to several cases of beer. It's a lot easier to drink yourself sick on straight cheap vodka than it is on cheap beer.
mlcastle, in #1, has put her/his finger on the actual problem here -- people in most parts of the U.S. cannot have lives without each using their own large machine, one that weighs thousands of pounds and moves at speeds where the slightest error can be disastrous. It's insane, but that's the way it is.
Naturally, young people want to get bombed out of their minds. It's a lot of fun and youth the one time in your life you can do it without killing yourself (usually). People should be able to do this in a safe, congenial place without having to drive a car to get to it or go home.
Take a look at the mugshots Nassau county publishes every week for DUI arrests. It's not a bunch of teenagers driving drunk, they are adults. Idiots are idiots, regardless of age.
The college presidents want it lowered because they have a massive liability issue on their hands trying to chaperone a population that wants to drink. They spend tons of money and resources on policing this, that would be better spent otherwise.
the age split is illogical, if we want to have age imposed limitations on legal rights, then they should be equal across the board.
personally i think that 18 year olds, although for the most part just legalized kids, deserve the right. this is coming from a parent of a 17 year old, and yeah i'm scared shitless that she'll do something stupid. that's where the responsibility of parents and raising your kids comes in, and i don't think it's the govt's place to decide that she's old enough to drive, pay taxes, serve in the military, etc etc, and not be allowed to make her own decisions as they pertain to legal activities.
that being said i just laugh since the year they upped it to 21, i turned 21...
When it comes to college campuses, the high drinking age encourages drinking without supervision, in the privacy of a residence. At least in a bar, the bar tenders are responsible for not over serving patrons. In a dorm, frat house, or apartment, the only people who determine whether someone is drinking to much are peers, who are also drinking too much. A lower drinking age would bring college students out of drinking in private into the public sphere where their consumption would be more easily regulated.
Also, as far as "the morons at MADD," that organization should focus on ending drunk driving, not being at the forefront of the modern temperance movement.
Rather than sending our country back to the prohibition era, MADD should be lobbying for better mass transit, denser cities, and a graduated process for legal drinking (i.e., 18 for on-premises drinking, where it is supervised by responsbile adults, 21 for off-premises drinking, when they have learned the consequences of drinking).
That will do a lot more to reduce drunk driving than fighting a losing battle to keep alcohol out of the hands of college kids.
This has been said so many times that it's practically a cliche, but the problem is how we treat alcohol in this country. Not to pull out the tired "in Europe" card, but by the time a European student gets to college, alcohol is just another part of life. When an American student gets to college, it's OMFG THERE'S BEER AT THIS PARTY!!!!1!
Would lowering the drinking age help with that? Maybe a little -- it might help discourage the idea that booze is a forbidden secret. And there is some truth to the idea that restricting alcohol to people over 21 really just means "restricting alcohol to house parties," where students are more likely to binge drink and then drive home -- and that it would be better for students to learn about alcohol by having a glass of wine with dinner at the Olive Garden than to learn about it by having a Solo Cup of Everclear mixed with Hi-C at someone's house.
But to really make a difference the culture would have to change. We would have to say that alcohol in moderation is normal, and remove the fetish about it. If we instead just say "alcohol is still a dark, secret, evil, and tantalizing thing...that can NOW be enjoyed at age 18!" . . . well, that's not going to do anything.
What is this about the drinking age or the ability for college kids to drink legally? How about all the 18 year olds that don't go to college?
The age reduction does set up a situation where 18 year olds could supply younger kids with alcohol. Perhaps restricting the sell to wine and beer might be the way to go. Although that can be abused also.
Snoopy,
Perhaps a better solution to restricting wine and beer would be to limit sales of alcohol to 18-20 year olds as open containers only. That is, only at a bar or restaurant, and never package goods from a liquor store.
Do you mean like the old fashioned growlers?
#28 (Thespis)--yep, yep, yep. It's an attitude/culture thing. I'm not saying its exclusively a US problem--there are drunks and jerks everywhere. But, yeah, we have an unhealthy attitude towards alcohol here, and it fosters irresponsibility.
I and most of my friends with Euro. parents (or who were raised there) thought of alcohol as no big thing when we were growing up. Why? Because it wasn't "forbidden fruit"--it was just really diluted fruit until we were deemed old enough (physically/legally and emotionally) to handle it.
At big holiday dinners, beginning sometime during grade school, you'd have a small, very watered-down glass of wine to drink along with the adults. You'd get a few sips of champagne on New Year's Eve. You could drink beer at family bbq's in your teens, etc., etc. Everyone I know who was raised that way, when they reached legal drinking age, went "whoop-de-do, whatever," while all of their dorm buddies went crazy from the sudden novelty of being "legal," got trashed, and barfed all over the hall (usually because of bad booze combos). Classy.
Another plus--in addition to holding onto some shred of dignity when I hit 21--I was the only kid in my dorm who knew how to mix a decent martini.
Thespis and lucyvanpelt (#28 and #32, respectively) are spot on!
I think I would go even farther and say that the culture isn't going to change until the law does. I'm not sure why the age was changed to 21 in the first place, but the illegality factor definitely makes it more attractive and problematic. Most of the rest of the world has a lower drinking age, and they seem to get along just fine.
Honestly, the biggest reason this won't change is that people are scared of change. (Oh no! Armageddon!) Give it a few years for 18-21 year-olds to get it out of their system, then everyone will be bored with the whole subject and wonder why it was such a big deal to begin with.
for what it's worth, i like my bars relativley free of lol-ing 18 year old stacies who drunkenly snap photos for facebook every 5 seconds. theres my 2 cents. carry on..
now that i think of it, older women aren't much better.
Listen to the fucking brutal stories of stupid underage kids killing each other while driving drunk. I hope they spend every cent they have to contest this moronic initiative.
Yes, because appealing to strong, emotional reactions is exactly the way we should go about making laws.
It isn't the laws, stupid. It's the groups like SADD and DARE that have been educating kids about what happens when they're idiots because parents are too blind to do it. MADD are neo-prohibitionists. They don't want to teach people about anything, they want it to be illegal to drink.
Irresponsible kids die from drinking and driving. More of them die from speeding.
I mentioned the ID issue on another bulletin board about the drinking age. I completely agree with Talos. Loads of people are buying these fake ids just to drink and get into bars. In most countries, fake ids are just used by criminals. But over here, theres huge demand for the fakes, and that creates a huge supply of them with lots of suppliers. It actually is a security issue having this law create such a large demand for fake ids. If the drinking age were lowered to 18 sure some older looking 17 year olds are gonna try to get fakes but it wouldnt be as big of a problem. All the college-age fake ID makers would probably stop what they were doing since thered be so many less people to sell to, just HS kids and criminals.
Read up bout the founder of MADD. Candy Lightner actually left the organization she started because it became more about banning alcohol than about stopping drunken driving.
"MADD has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving".[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Lightner
If you got to MADD's website you'll barely find anything mentioned about its founder for this very reason.
DAMM, or Drunks Against Mad Mothers supports this idea. For more on DAMM's positions on this and many other alcohol-related topics, just leave a fifth in a brown paper bag at my front stoop. I'll get back to you.
I have long thought that the ideas expressed by this initiative make sense. A further stipulation that I thought would work would be to lower the legal drinking age in bars and clubs only. This would provide a public place where people can drink in a somewhat monitored environment, and could be "cut-off" after drinking too much. Venues can apply for a special permit that would allow them to sell to persons 18 years and older, but would also require them to hire extra security and hold them to a tougher standard if people are found to be drinking at dangerous levels.
This would also protect people from the dangers that can be found at "keggers" where under aged drinkers are often encouraged to consume as much as they possibly can. I have seen the results of this behavior first hand while at that age and they don't typically end well.
It would also disable people from buying booze for themselves and their younger friends and drinking in an unsupervised environment.
Tkaisen—you blog about professional wrestling and call me stupid? I know what MADD is about and support organizations who look to make a change. if dumbass kids kill when drunk, a good solution may be to ban them from drinking. Now go back to writing about muscle men in tights moron...
Considering you can die for your country at 18
I think they should be able to have a beer too.
They should raise the age of driving though to 21 (at least) No there is a way to get cars off the road.