The logic behind making the drinking age 21 was to keep alcohol out of the hands of college students. The age of 20, while being a round number, is still college-age. (Of course, college kids drink anyway, but that is another story). 
Okay,
It seeme like the person who organised these ages for america (persons?) doesnt know their two times table…
(excuse my ignorance)
…16, 18, 20, 21??
Here in New Zealand 16 is the legal age for sex, 15 is the legal age to drive, and 18 is the legal age for purchasing alchohol and voting… hmmph… :s
Later,
Russell
I used to live in Ohio (USA) where age of consent was 18. Now I live in Washington state, where I recently learned that the age of consent is 16. My guess is that the population density is so low out here, every little bit helps! 
And I would NEVER let a 15-year-old drive my car!
how is it (U.S. residents, specifically male residents)… that at the age of 18, they can draft us and send off to die in a foriegn country, but we can’t have a beer…
so we’re grown up enough to die for our country, we can vote to elect the most powerful man in the world… but we can’t get drunk enough to actually think that any of those candidates will do a good job… BAH!
<<<ps… for all those dopers that want to know about alcohol… you can probably buy reagent grade (99.999% pure, but check your catalogue) ethanol (CH3CH2OH) from chemical supply houses pretty cheaply to “clean your beakers for your organic chem experiments”…
just make certain that you do the math and stoiciometry right… roughly speaking 0.05 Liters of pure ethanol will make you very ‘drunk’, 0.1 Liters of pure ethanol will make you too drunk to walk… 0.2 Liters might put you in the hospital, 0.3 Liters might put you in the grave…
>>>
Legal disclaimer… though I did mention that you could probably buy reagent grade ethanol, I did not suggest that anyone actually consume it, and if you do buy reagent grade ethanol, I suggest you burn it… there is a chance that a certain amount of methanol will be present that could cause blindness, or death, or worse… and if you do burn it, burn it in a non-confined area…
I often wonder if I should post what I know about chemistry in these forums…
If it helps you any bobo, drinking laws are almost entirely ignored on military bases, and defintiely irrelevent overseas.
Twenty-one is college aged too. Most college students turn 21 during their junior year. That is why it is so easy for underaged college students to obtain alcohol. There are always plenty of-age students around to buy it for them. This is probably one reason why the drinking age was raised above 18; it’s one thing if college freshmen have older friends on campus who can buy them alcohol and another thing if high school freshmen have older friends on campus who can buy them alcohol. Although many high school students do drink I know it is much more difficult for them to get alcohol than it is for college students.
We have/had a (more or less popular depending on the subject matter) series called "Ask the [fill in the blank] expert. I’m sure that, should you start one on chemistry, yours would be a raving success…
So, with thanks to all contributors, any legal eagles roaming around to answer my specific questions (as per manhattan’s request:rolleyes: ), i.e.:
Given the (to-be-expected) tangents this OP has given rise to, maybe I should have followed my first inclination and posted this in the ‘Great Debates’ forum. But then again, maybe it’s not a lofty enough subject…
Anyhoo, if manny deems it more suited for GD, I wouldn’t have any objection to its transfer.
Who knows why the various state legislatures arrive at their age of consent for various activities, such as drinking or sex. Each state is different and govern by different factors. All of these ages, however, relate back to the “common law.” When we gained our independence from England, we adopted that common law and that still is the law of the land, except (and this is a big exception) as it has been changed by the legislatures or Congress. Even then, if there is any ambiguity as to whether the common law was repealed, it is presumed that it was not. Witness such things as common law marriages, still recognized in some states altho all the states have statutory marriages.
I think all of these various US legal ages to do this or that are purely arbitrary. Each one was arrived at through compromise, or was changed from something else in an attempt to solve some percieved problem.
Interestesting questions might be, which of these legal ages are actually enforced? And why do we cling to the ones we know we can’t enforce? Driving, signing contracts, and joining the military are three that it seems to me are real laws that are acutally followed most of the time. OTOH, laws that forbid drinking, smoking, and being sexually active prior to a specific birthday are widely ignored with impunity. People violating these laws can be fairly confident of getting away with it.
I’m not averse to starting a new channel about ask the [random topic] man… or ask the expert/whatever…
my only fear was that I might be pointing out ways that people that shouldn’t be imbibing could buy pure alcohol…
<<<<<<< he says hypocritically as he takes a long sip of 18 year old single malt scotch and remembers his youth fondly >>>>>>>>>>
<<<oh wait… I mis-spent my youth and I’m still making the serious money so I can enjoy 18 year scotch on saturday nights… hmmmmmmmmmm… ok kids… go for it, no, work hard so you can be an ass like me… or something, …I don’t know)
damn… I worked hard and played hard… and I still do… ok… work hard and play hard…
<legal disclaimer>
don’t do anything even remotely illegal
</legal disclaimer>
<bs>
or something
</bs>
damn it’s hard to try to act like a role model… I’m the exact model of what not to become… damn…
ummm… NO…
from the first time that alcohol was restricted, it was restricted to adults… so you had to be 18 (and that was only after it was finally restricted)…
so for a LONG time it was 18+… (and that was hundreds of years ago)
but after a long while they realized that high school students were drinking… so there was a campaign to limit the drinking age to 21+, because 21 was well beyond high school age…
so the legal age migrated to 21 (in the late 80s if I’m not mistaken)…
just a different standard…
<<<though I can’t side against the idea of raising the idea, I must say it’s wrong to impose rules on adults that don’t stand against other adults…>>>
Bobo, I think you’ve missed a factor: drinking and driving. When I was a kid, the legal drinking age in NY state was 18. In the adjacent states, NJ and CT, it was 21. 18, 19, and 20 year olds in NJ and CT used to drive into NY to drink. Inevitably, some drove home in an unfit-to-drive state. Inevitably, some crashed their cars, killing or injuring themselves, or their passengers, or people in other cars, or pedestrians.
Politicans and citizens in NJ and CT were constantly agitating for NY to raise its drinking age, so as to prevent these auto accidents. I don’t remember any mention of any other reason for urging NY to change its law.
But I don’t remember NJ and CT ever having a lower drinking age then 21. If they ever did, and raised it, I don’t know what the excuse for doing so was. It could have had to do with “protecting” high schoolers. Perhaps this began to seem necessary when a higher percentage of teens began staying in school past 8th grade.
Eventually, all the states enacted an age 21 drinking law, for the same reason that all the states enacted a 55 miles per hour highway speed limit. The federal government coerced the states into passing the law it wanted by threatening to withhold funds from any state that defied them.
(It never occured to people to suggest that NJ or CT lower their drinking age to 18, although that would have also eliminated the problem of inexperienced young drinkers facing a long drive home after an evening of imbibing in NY. If they’d been able to drink legally in their own home towns, they might well have been able to walk home from a neighborhood tavern.)
Louisiana hung on to 18 for drinking for a while, by making some compromises. If you were 18-20, you could buy beer and wine, and there were some other restrictions I can’t remember, but just last year they changed it to 21 like all the other states.
I think it’s really stupid, I got busted with ‘Minor in Possession’ when I was 20 fucking years old. I’d been drinking for about 9 years, hard for 5, and had been arrested and prosecuted as an adult for other crimes, but suddenly I’m a ‘Minor’? I think we need one age for anything…at one point you are a child, not responsible for your own welfare, and thus under your parent’s jursidiction, so to speak, and at some point you are an adult.
I think maybe they should give people a test, you can take it when you are 15, and keep retaking it each year. Make it a bunch of true/false questions about stuff adults should know about, how to drive, how the government works, what your rights are, how babies are made, how to open and manage a checking account, how to apply for a job…only problem I can see with that is there would be people who would remain minors their whole lives…maybe require that people who don’t pass it by the time they are 25 be made into wards of the state and/or slaves or something.