That is not Science but journalism and Public Relations. The ‘evidence’ is a trawl of possible causes by a group of academics with a PR goal.
It may well have shown correlation with reduced accidents and such, but the same pattern has been occurring in the UK over the last couple of decades with reductions in deaths caused by alcohol in young drivers. Cherry picking reviews are untrustworthy. Correlation does not imply causation.
I’m 43 years old. I like to go to bars. Love to to watch sports of all kinds over drinks. Over the last ten years, my friends and I debated the drinking age off and on. Here’s our solution:
Dead serious.The amount of times watching idiotic 21-somethings try to be grown up is somewhat funny, but it gets real depressing when we hear things like, “Hey, I’m 21. You HAVE to serve me, dude!” Uh, no. No they don’t.
Even funnier when they expect any bar to accept Discover or American Express, or even EBT cards. “Come on, dude! I got $25,000 credit on my Discover!”
If there’s a fight, the perps are always under 25. Dress code?? That’s unheard of and a “violation of my right to express myself!” :rolleyes:
I agree, the older you get the more young people are a royal pain in the arse. That isn’t a good reason though to deny them the basic amenities of civilized life (and having a drink with your buddies in a bar is most definitely one of those amenities.)
Good point. But I felt the same way at 31 as I do now! 
Excuse me while I go borrow my grandma’s walker.
Borrows walker and plonks it energetically on the floor, banging it occasionally to wake up those who’ve fallen asleep.
I grew up without drinking ages, also with very little binge drinking; the idea that “the perfect party is that one you have to be told about” couldn’t have been furthest from my early-teen cohorts. There are exceptions to every rule (and I have names and lastnames for this one) but in general we reckoned that getting heavily and/or nastily drunk once was a learning experience; doing it twice was an indication of stupidity. Doing it on purpose indicated the complete lack of a working brain.
At one point, our government got worried about binge drinking, so they set a drinking age - before that age, it was illegal to let your kids try a sip of your beer (a well-known method to ensure that your curious 6yo wouldn’t want to try that bitter thing again until he was 13 at least). Reaction from my classmates (college): “they’re worried about teenagers doing something stupid so they go and ban it? Have these morons never been 15? They just made getting drunk cool!”
The kids who don’t consider “it’s forbidden” as the perfect reason to do something do not need this kind of rules; those who will do things because they are forbidden, rules like this just fuel the fire.
IIRC, the 1984 law was passed because of issues caused by the disparity in drinking ages in locations near state borders. There was a disparity in the drinking ages in NY and NJ which led to scads of NJ young adults driving to NYC to drink then killing themselves on the drive back home.
I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another about 18 vs 21. I went to college in the days of the 18 year old drinking age - which was lowered from 21 in most states during the '70’s as a response to the Vietnam war and the draft - the reasoning being that if the government was going to send you away to be shot in a foreign jungle then they should at least let you have a beer before shipping you out.
The states started raising the drinking ages randomly in the early '80’s causing the disparities and local issues for state line communities.
The drinking age should be 18. People should use their turn signals. If you open a door you should shut it behind you. People should wait patiently in line. The world is full of things that should happen but don’t. This one is hardly worth getting worked up over.
At which point we’d charge him as an adult, of course.
I’m sorry, but I simply cannot bring myself to tell a law-abiding voter that he’s old enough to join the military or serve on a jury – indeed, that I may well compel him to do either or both – but he can’t be trusted with a beer. What you say is true; there’s no necessary reason to treat such folks as consenting adults across the board just because we’re most of the way there; but I can’t stomach the unfairness.
Not everyone goes to the bar to watch sports and have a beer or two with dinner. That is a UK/Sports Bar thing. In the US there are plenty of bars I’ve been to where everyone was up and dancing, getting drunk. Sounds like your bar is selling out its image for more customers.
I don’t agree that getting “trashed” more than once makes you stupid. People take plenty of risks for rewards. The reward for getting trashed is sometimes having a story worth telling for ages! 
But generally, yes, if you get vomit-inducing-drunk on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis, odds are you’s a dummy.
That is an incredibly good point. I know when I lived in Upstate NY I would, from time to time, drive to Canada to get drunk. I’d make safe arrangements to get home, obviously, and good thing too because I think those border patrol agents would have kicked my ass otherwise.
Increasingly, I find this argument unconvincing, and more and more it just seems like a bumper sticker trying to be passed off as philosophy.
Just because some can be in the military, doesn’t necessarily mean that he should have every other right under the sun. (Speaking as a guy who could legally drink at 18, and who had been in the military for close to 30 years.) So what? He’s usually under adult supervision in the military. And a vote generally doesn’t kill someone. But drinking and driving, is a public issue.
The reason the prohibition is there is because we’d like to protect him (and us) from his drinking. Many 18 year olds just don’t have the maturity to drink. And yes, many 18 year olds in the military aren’t all that mature either.
I guess my biggest issue with lowering the drinking age to 18 is that it makes it harder for 14 and 15 year olds to drink. 21 year olds will by booze for 18 year olds, but I don’t think many will buy it for 14 and 15 year olds.
I was in high school when the drinking age in my state was raised from 18 to 19, and there was an immediate drop in the number of fights at school, and kids coming to school drunk.
I think it should be 19 for this reason. People can vote, own property, and go to war before the age of 21; why not be able to drink too?
When I was in college in MA the drinking age was 18, and we had a pub on campus. We all got rip roaring drunk most weekends. I doubt the experience has changed much, except for the pub on campus part.
Our mantra used to be: old enough for fightin’, but not for votin’.
Now it should be: old enough for fightin’, but not for drinkin’!
I think the ultimate solution is to design vehicles that the driver has to pass a breathalyzer to drive. If the driver happens to be drunk and trying to drive, the vehicle crushes that side of the car, rendering the selfish scumbag into a puddle.
I had a bit of culture shock when I was returning from Nam and in uniform and was told I was too young to buy a beer at the airport bar. I figured it was just another case of “Dogs and Soldiers: Keep Off The Grass”.
When I grew up in Ohio, at age 18, you could buy “Low” beer (3.2%) and at 21 you could get any sort of alcohol. So, going to a bar, you’d get either a red or blue handstamp depending on your age. I think that compromise made sense.
I started drinking around 14 or 15. There are plenty of ways to get alcohol, but it’s difficult enough that when you do score, you tend to take “full advantage” of the situation and drink way too much (plus, you have no idea how to drink responsibly at that age). I guess I have enough libertairan in me to think the government should let legal adults make their own decisions about alcohol and live with the consequences. I say this as someone who has a daughter with a serious alcohol problem (not yet 21 years old) and I am very mindful of the dangers.
spifflog, have you met spifflog?
It seems the two of you have some catching up to do.
Seriously, though - drinking generally doesn’t kill someone. The difference is that a vote can kill millions, while a drink can pretty much only kill whoever you hit.
It’s got nothing to do with bumper stickers. It’s to do with the fundamental underpinnings of society. In a liberal democracy, we don’t ask ourselves whether we should allow people to do things. The default position is that people are allowed to do things. We ask ourselves whether we have good reasons to prohibit those things.
Sadly, I don’t believe the government has thought that way for a very long time.
While I recognize your effort to be both snarky and funny concurrently (and it’s a wonderful thing to behold when it works, less so here). I’m not sure what your point is.
18 year olds can vote. Great. But his or her one vote, no matter how poorly cast isn’t going to kill anyone. Do all teenagers drink and drive? No. But a drunk 18 year old (or as I expressed) a drunk 15 year old behind the wheel can kill people, and that is a big public concern to me.
I think a fundamental underpinning of our society is to balance individual liberty with the public good. There is a reason you can’t drink and drive. Our society has determined one person’s desire to get trashed and drive home is over ridden by our collective desire to be safer on the highways. So I think there is a good reason to prohibit 18 year olds and below from drinking. You don’t agree.
As has been mentioned, following the rules is the exception. There are a couple problems that would be eliminated with a lowering of the age to 18.
On the occasions people get access to alcohol they drink to excess in an attempt to make the most of the opportunity. When my friends and I took the risk of using fake IDs to get into bars, you better believe we drank enough to make it worth the trouble.
If someone underage drinks enough to get alcohol poisoning there is the concern of criminal charges or university punishment for those involved when they call for help.
Right, this makes sense to me. For Americans under 21, every chance to drink has to be taken full advantage of, since they don’t know when the next chance they’ll have to drink is. There might be another party with alcohol next weekend, or there might not be one for another month.
Those over 21 will drink when they get the chance, but won’t be drinking like a man in the desert who suddenly found water. They can enjoy drinking at the party, but they know they can also go out the next day or week or whenever they want to and get more alcohol without a problem.
This is interesting, but it seems to me to be correlation, not causation. That article says “There also is evidence that the age limit curbs other hazards of heavy drinking, including suicide, dating violence and unprotected sex,” but it doesn’t say what the evidence is. There have been various changes in our culture since the drinking laws have passed that could account for those other hazards. From what I understand there have been attitude changes in the culture towards drunk driving, domestic violence, premarital sex, and birth control, which could account for some of the improvements since then, it’s not all because of the drinking age going from 18 to 21.
I would love to see some science on what the changes would be if the drinking age was lowered back down to 18. But I’m not sure how one would accurately study that. The only thing I could think of is if one US state lowered their drinking age to 18, and a study was conducted comparing what happened in that state to a similar neighboring state that still had the drinking age of 21.
I wasn’t aware of this, but it makes sense. It seems like that problem could be solved if either all the states lowered the drinking age at the same time, or by making drunk driving penalties super harsh and making drinking under age penalties relatively light.
That’s my main hesitation for lowering the drinking age. In college, the 21 year olds would buy the alcohol for their younger friends. If 18 year olds in high school could buy alcohol, they would be buying it for their younger friends. Maybe this could be solved by lowering the drinking age to 19, since most 19 year olds are out of high school.