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Should We Lower the Drinking Age? — Troy Senik
Camille Paglia thinks so. Writing at Time:
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
… What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — Ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.
Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas, and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as today’s massively overprescribed anti-depressants, linger in body and brain and may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres. Half of the urban professional class in the U.S. seems doped on meds these days.
I’m actually open to Paglia’s point on the principles level. It is pretty hard to articulate the logic for the 18/21 divide.
That said, I find several of the lines of argument here unpersuasive. Appeals to which nations our legal code aligns with leave me cold, as do vague warnings about “unrecognized long-term side effects” and “shadowy firms abroad,” the kind of weasel words usually employed by someone who doesn’t have any evidence. (I’m not confidently stating that the pills that Paglia decries are necessarily harmless, by the way — that’s well beyond my area of expertise —but you have to either make specific claims or keep quiet). I’m also having a hard time picturing this fictional 19-year-old who, because he can’t get a Sam Adams at an Applebee’s, decides it’s open season for ketamine.
My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that the drinking age law doesn’t have much effect outside of the margins. If you want to get it, you can. It’s nearly impossible to keep a product that’s legal for one segment of the population out of the hands of other segments unless you control distribution on a much tighter basis than we’re generally willing to do with booze (this is the same reason why medical marijuana has always struck me as an untenable compromise position).
As with most prohibitions, the group most affected is likely the ones you least have to worry about — those who take the sanction of law seriously enough that illegality, regardless of the merits, is sufficient to deter them. As a result, I’d have to conclude that changing the law wouldn’t be a huge deal — but also that letting it stand falls far short of the cosmic injustice that Paglia imagines.
What do you think?
Published in General
When a law is widely and blatantly ignored it is not a good thing for society to leave it on the books without a very compelling reason. The burden of proof should not be on those seeking to lower the drinking age it should be on those seeking to keep it higher.
That said, one argument I personally find compelling is that 18 year old’s are still in high school and have a lot of younger 16, 17 year old friends. However that is not an argument for keeping it at 21, it is more of an argument for making it 19 instead of 18. Yes there are some 19 year old’s still in high school but far fewer…
Also, the husband spent a good chunk of his senior year in high school in an alcohol dry-out facility. He had been caught drunk driving (at 18) for a second time and was told he could either do that or spend some time in jail. He and his parents decided getting dried out sounded like a better idea. His parents then had to put up with relatives who blamed them because they were/are teetotalers. As if that were somehow dishonorable and that they had really fallen down on the job of parenting for not “teaching” him how to drink.
The drinking age is stupid, and I have seen it used against parents. A waitress, for instance, once threatened to call the cops on my own parents for offering my sister (then 20 yrs, 10 mos) a sip of a beverage at a restaurant.
Stupid laws encourage busybodies to interfere where they don’t belong. If I were to offer my daughter a sip of wine at home, and if she were to mention this in earshot of a teacher, I could well find myself hauled before either the school or a government agency.
I’m almost always with Bill
My evil scheme worked! I offended someone!!!!
Mwahahahahahahaha!!!!
Misthiocracy,
Well you didn’t really offend me so too bad! But beer in the states out paces Europe’s selection by far. While maybe true 20 years ago, America beats the hell out of the rest of the world in quality and selection.
If you’re still drinking bud I feel sorry for you.
He’s Canadian, he’s stuck with Molson or Labatts.
Ackshully, Labatt has the license to make Budweiser in Soviet Canuckistan.
I drink Guinness, PBR, and Québecois micro-brews.
I am in favor of a drinking age of 21, but this might be a good compromise: Eighteen for beer and wine, and 21 for distilled spirits.
Teenagers in my town tend to fill their water bottles with vodka from their parents’ liquor cabinets. Because they have so little experience with distilled spirits, they end up getting overly intoxicated and even alcohol poisoning. I think this would occur less frequently with access to beer. Also, I am in favor of a healthy introduction to alcohol at the family dinner table.
About the early-to-mid-nineties there was something of a micro-brew renaissance here in the Pacific Northwest that spread out to neighboring regions. Micro-breweries still pop up every so often, however about late nineties on to the turn of the century, eyes turned toward wine — in Oregon the Willamette and Yamhill Valley exploded with vintners.
Now, it seems, hard alcohol is getting its turn in popularity, and we’re getting some interesting ones.
Hmm. Pasty-faced northern Europeans don’t do so well in this regard. By contrast, countries where wine is culturally an integral and healthy part of family dining (Portugal, Italy, Greece, France) do much better. It is for this reason that I have attempted to serve my 14-year-old small quantities of wine occasionally at meals. She has thus far declined it.
Interesting trivia on breweries in the USA:
In the early 80s there were I think under 100 operating, and most of those were merely regional operations for one of the major brands. This was due to rent-seeking cartelization of the industry through things like mandatory 3-tier distribution (can’t sell directly to the consumer) or state monopolies on sales (Pennsylvania is still this way, to their shame).
Now there are over 2500.
Distilleries went through a similar decline as deregulation there has been a slower process (states don’t like to give up their sales monopolies, PA I’m cursing you for this even now).
Same for wineries.
American beer and spirits were, prior to prohibition, robust both in variety and quality, it has taken almost a century to bring that quality back.
As for American beer quality now surpassing European levels, I can well see that argument being made. Europe’s variety is actually in part due to a weird twist, and is partly the victim of its own cartelization.
See, nations like France sought to protect their cultural identities against American products, which is why their government has spent so much time defining cheese types, bread types, wine types, etcs. They took their natural variety, the product of 2 millenia, and have frozen it at some mythic ideal level (basically 1910). Germany has done this to some extent, as has Spain, Denmark, Sweden, etc.
This has certainly protected their little regional pockets, but this has also effectively outlawed futher innovation.
Just looking at breads, for instance, American bakeries now frequently beat French ones in international competitions because the French are not allowed to innovate. We figured out their bread formulas, then adapted and improved on them. The French, by law, have to make their baguettes the same way they have for 100 years.
Apply that to wine, to beer, and to spirits. If the FDA would leave dairy farmers alone, the American cheese revolution would see the same development.
How about leaving it up to he states like we used to?
When I grew up in Ohio, the drinking age was 18 for 3.2% beer; 21 for spirits. It allowed kids to experiment with drinking with less risk of intoxication. Takes more than a few 3.2% beers to get plastered. I also like ( as in Europe) stringent DUI laws to go along with lowered drinking age. Designated Drivers/Uber/Lyft are a very good thing!
At 3.2%, does it even qualify as “beer”?! That’s more that sodee-pop!
;-)
When I went into the Marine Corps at 18 I was not eligible for alcohol in many locals in this country. I was man enough to serve and protect us against enemies foreign and domestic but could not enjoy a beer.
Should we risk a drinking age of 18? Yes. Will it work out right in all cases? Nope. Should we continue the ban? Nope. If we can man the military or get married, we should able to drink.
Q: What’s the difference between a lager and a pilsner?
A: One tastes like pee flavored water; the other tastes like watery pee.
Absolutely. We saw this issue upfront when eldest was a co-ed. Stupid law. And echoing anonymous, my youngest who was partially schooled abroad agrees that her Euro peers do not drink to excess like their American counterparts. Ms. Smith thinks it prevents some kids from drinking so it should be maintained. My experience is it leads to fake i.d.’s. Lower the drinking age. Or raise the military induction, voting and marriage ages.
If you are old enough to die for your country you are old enough to drink.
No way. P**s has flavour.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I am from a forbidden fruit family, and spent my freshman year of college experimenting with getting blackout drunk. That said, our puritanical background and cultural views of ETOH will not change based on legal drinking age. The argument for going back to 18 is solid, and based in liberty and equity. The bad stuff is happening, will continue to happen, but at least we won’t make a bunch of adults into criminals.
On the other hand you can’t easily rent a car until you’re 25 (but not due to law). I am for the lowering of the drinking age to 18, and am especially against federal involvement in the issue.
But if we’re going to keep it at 21, I would allow drinking by all military members on base. I’ve got mixed feelings about the arguments about otherwise being an adult at eighteen. Despite the legal distinction, culturally we are encouraging a longer adolescence going into the late twenties.
I come late to the party -assorted thoughts:
1.) We forget that the reason we had prohibition here was because we had a serious problem with alcohol here. Women were instrumental in passing the prohibitions because women were the ones who were beaten when their husbands came home drunk. Here in Kentucky, alcohol was banned during WWI because all the men were gone and couldn’t object. We’ve been liberalizing the laws since. To my knowledge, this was not the case in Europe.
2.) We also forget that prohibition worked. Alcohol consumption shrank, and crime was broken in 1930. It fell back to to the 1919 level before repeal in 1933. Prohibition was repealed because the elite and the intellectuals wanted it repealed, and because FDR wanted to tax alcohol (so sayeth Fred Siegel). I note in passing this is the exact same reason for the spurt of Wet votes here in Kentucky over the past 5 years. College educated residents want it done, and the Chamber of Commerce wants it taxed.
cont.
Assorted thoughts cont.
3.) We’re railing against it here, but it is not obvious that graduated adulthood is a bad idea. Drinking at 21 but voting and military service at 18 are actually fairly recent. In the 1860s you could join the military as young as 14 (musicians) or 16 (infantry), but the vote was still reserved for those over 21. The driving age is as low as 14 in some states, and several states have even adopted graduated driving ages -permits at 14 or 15, daylight license at 16, full license at 18. Given this level of commonality, the real question is why have everything hit at 18, not why other things hit at different ages. I do, however, concur that we delay adulthood too much.
4.) Finally, I would be fine with moving this back to the states (as I am fine with the alcohol regulation being sent to the counties and cities), but the federal interest in road safety on federal roads and transportation of goods across state lines makes it not obvious that the feds have no role in alcohol policy -even if it is greatly reduced from their current role.
It should left to the states, and yes, it should be lowered.
My wife is German and she grew up drinking the wine from her uncle’s vineyards and hard cider made by her dad in the cellar – both mixed with mineral water – from an early age. As an adult, she drinks considerably less – and less of the hard stuff – than I do.
As several have pointed out, the official minimum age to buy alcohol in Germany is 16, but I’m unaware of any minimum drinking age. Alcohol (and the taboos of its misuse) are tightly woven into the culture. Although things can sometimes get wild at fests, it’s rare in my experience to see an intoxicated German.
One of the surprising things to me when I first visited Germany was the proliferation of small distilling operations. Many farmers in my wife’s area grow cherries, plums, and other fruits that they distill into brandies. They then bring the brandy into town where they purchase a tax stamp and sell it in the stores. I’ve never actually seen a liquor store there, as such things are sold in shops, grocery stores, and even convenience stores.
I don’t think changing the drinking age will have any effect one way or the other on binge drinking. That’s more an effect of the overall culture of irresponsibility America has created over the past fifty years or so.