When I was 18, there were some 18/21 states–you could drink beer and wine at 18, harder liquor and fortified wine at 21. At the time, that seemed reasonable. I went to college in a 21 state, but the binging was pretty much confined to frats.
Statistics based on real-world occurence are as fair as it gets. Everything that isn’t statistics are unfair.
I’m for a 19 year old drinking age.
Back in the 70’s when the age here was 18 the majority of us turned 18 when we were seniors in high school.
Because of this, one could get alcohol in their high school freshman year because there was always some seniors that would get it for you (at a generous profit to them, of course).
When my sister was in high school in the mid-80’s Wisconsin briefly had a drinking age of 19. She reported that it was very difficult to get booze.
My theory is this is because there are very few 19 year olds in high school. And once a person is out of high school they are not dealing as much with those that still are.
Thus, a 19 year old age would greatly reduce the odds of 14 year olds of getting liquor.
The 21 year old age is extremely discriminatory and leads to binge drinking, in my observation.
Ontario moved it from 18 to 19 back in about 1980 for that exact reason.
I could certainly see a rationale for making it 19 given the high school supply issue.
“Our society” has done no such thing.
Prior to 1984, states set their own drinking ages.* To solve the “bloody borders” problem Ann Hedonia mentioned, MADD decided we needed a uniform drinking age. Because MADD doesn’t want anyone drinking, they picked the higher prevailing age (21) rather than the lower one. It had nothing to do with preventing drunken driving generally. It was solely about preventing 18-20 year olds from driving into another state to get loaded. They could just as easily have written the legislation so any liquor licensee within (say) 75 miles of a state border could only serve alcohol to people with in-state driver’s licenses - but they didn’t, because MADD had no interest in using the least restrictive means to achieve its goal.
If your goal is to make the roads safe, it’s not the drinking age that should concern you. It’s the driving age. Cars can kill whether you’re drunk or sober.
*states still nominally set their own drinking ages but they set them at 21 if they want highway funding.
That’s because when underagers get ahold of some booze they drink as much as they can, especially when it’s a freeforall kegger.
Now imagine the same guys could legally drink in a bar, paying each time they order a drink. There is a psychological effect to that. Also, the behavior of people drinking in a bar is more monitored and kept in check than that of someone drinking in a frat house.
Americans overall have a screwed up relationship with drinking, especially when compared to those in other parts of the world, such as Europe.
My fraternity was one of the most careful around when it came to binge drinking (our house was supposed to be dry, so any investigation would have meant instant shutdown) and we were still terrible at doing it safely. I think only one guy went to the hospital for alcohol-related issues during my time but that was mostly luck.
You wrote four paragraphs to nitpick and then said what I said. 18-21 year olds not drinking (and potentially driving) saves lives. And that is where collectively “we” (either on our own or with the push of MADD) have decided it should be - at least for now.
But they are a lot more likely to kill when a drunk is involved. BTW California has restrictions on what a kid with a new license can do in the first six months or so. No friends in the car unless an adult is also there, for instance. So states can do both.
When I was growing up in NY, the drinking age was 18 and the voting age was 21. Which made no sense. When I went to college in MA, it was 21. While liquor stores happily delivered to our dorm assuming that someone in it was 21, I did not notice people binge drinking just because they could get it. Back then, however, people were too busy getting stoned.
Nobody getting to drink at all would save lives, too. As would making everyone wear full-body Nerf suits, outlawing firearms, and requiring permits and 3 personal references for a license to use a knife sharper than a butterknife. Safer does not mean better in the context of a free society.
I don’t want to give up my right to drink, so I don’t think it’s right to take it away from a group of other citizens either. They can vote and pay taxes and enter contracts; they should be able to legally purchase alcohol.
And, frankly, in my experience, it absolutely encouraged binge drinking and reckless behavior. When we were 21, we hung around in dive bars nursing a drink (being poor students) and discussing philosophy; at 18, we knew we’d be in deep shit if we had liquor in our dorm room, so any bottle was essentially ‘single serving’.
I think the people who are favoring 19 as the proper age have the best of the argument. Personally I would keep the drinking age at 21 but have the state issue a special identification card to people who have graduated high school and let them drink as well. The money the cards cost could be recouped from the funding no longer necessary for the “Stay in School” campaigns. Have the card exception only apply in-state and there is no “bloody borders” issue.
And while we are making exceptions, the drinking age needs to be more flexible to allow parents to teach their kids how to drink responsibly. I don’t care what the law says, I don’t intend to have my kid learning about alcohol around a fire in some gravel pit like I did. Luckily I was sober enough to catch myself on a red hot rock the time I fell in. 3rd degree burns on the hands are a hell of lot less unpleasant than on the face.
I don’t think your idea of special drink cards for high school graduates would pass legal muster.
And the law in some states does allow underagers to drink with their parents. Around here it is not all that uncommon in some bars to see a 14 year old drinking with his old man.
To trot out another bumper-sticker philosophy, no, punishing the innocent for what the guilty do isn’t exactly the definition of fairness.
What’s your reaction when someone (a) discriminates against blacks, and (b) defends his action by pointing to statistics? If someone calls for higher taxes on – well, not folks with higher incomes exactly, but Jews, since as a matter of statistics they have higher incomes, so what could be fairer? Someone says women should be barred altogether from a field where males have historically had a statistical edge, because men have historically had a statistical edge?
If you want second-class citizens, I need a better reason than statistics.
And let me say this: when I turned 18 – and became a voter, and registered for the draft, and knew I’d face criminal charges like a grown man, and otherwise found myself holding down a job and paying taxes and signing contracts and waiting to get called for jury duty – the law of course didn’t stop me from drinking; does it stop anyone? It merely led me to reflect, beer in hand, that my country had an unjust law.
Big fan of oral sex, here, by the way. It was a felony in my state back then. Did that stop me from enjoying it? No, it just led me to respect the law a little less.
Got it. So when you turned 18, some magic happened. You learned that you had new responsibilities. You could vote, join the military, get married. And with these new found responsibilities, you became a better, more informed, productive and intelligent citizen. Well done.
Ohhh wait. You mean the magic didn’t take hold? Even with the right to join the military, cast the important vote, face charges “like a grown man” you still chose the break the law “knowing that you’d face criminal charges” like that grown man? Because, you know doesn’t everyone??? Sounds mature to me!
IMHO, you can’t have it both ways. Which is why asking our teenagers to wait three more years to drink isn’t all that bad - for them or for us.
Didn’t say that; I felt pretty much the same the day after my birthday as I had the day before. But while I felt no change when it came to responsibility and maturity, Some Magic Happened as far as society was concerned: suddenly contracts I signed, or jury-duty summons I received in the mail, and et cetera, became as real a possibility as getting conscripted for military service or facing jail time as an adult.
For the record, I kept breaking the law after turning 21. Because oral sex, you know?
I’m not the one trying to have it both ways. I’m saying that, as of right now, I have all the rights and responsibilities of a grown man; that, decades ago, I had neither those rights nor those responsibilities; and that, at eighteen and nineteen and twenty, society wanted to have it both ways: treating me as an adult in some ways but not in others.
It’s not like I said “Whoa, hey, don’t draft me, because I’m still just a kid. But let me buy a beer, because I’m a man.” That would be trying to have it both ways. It’d be pretty much indefensible. And it’s pretty much what society did.
That blacks need to up their game before racism returns with a basis in statistical reality, and that’s going to be a form of racism that’s going to be a lot harder to get overturned.
There’s an easier to identify those with a high income: It’s people with a high income.
Maybe back when tax collectors went from door to door with a sack and have no way to know what someone’s income is like, using statistical heuristics based on things one can see as they approach a house and view its occupants would make sense. But in the modern day, we know who has a high income and can go directly to them without having to use heuristics.
This is less efficient than setting minimum requirements for acceptance. All you’re doing is removing sections of the pool of possibilities. Maybe if you were in an emergency situation and needed to stock up on just anyone in a matter of minutes, using statistics to make a guess as to who to grab would make sense, but presuming a reasonable amount of time to widdle down applicants, there’s no reason to do that.
When we make choices on who to select for something, what we’re trying to do is take the information we can get and make a best-choice in the time allowed. If we can get more or better information feasibly, then we should do that, and be making a choice about the specific individual. That’s still just statistics, but it’s statistics with a greater number of input variables.
In the case of drunk driving, the person being asked to decide who is allowed to drive is a dude in Washington DC, who may have died several decades ago, and who has no reason to believe that he (or his proxy, in the form of a store clerk) can reasonably find out any more information about you than your age. If the decision seems slipshod, then there you go, but you’d need to have a better recommendation.
Fundamentally, drinking alcohol isn’t a necessity of life. There are plenty of other healthy, nourishing things that people can imbibe. People can enjoy their life just as well without alcohol. If you’ve never had any, then you’re not being deprived of something that you know and love. Any sort of view that some great hardship is being applied only makes sense from the standpoint of someone who has built up an addiction and can’t imagine the world without alcohol, or why do you think it’s a horrible offense to define a point at which someone is eligible for a beverage?
Any evidence that this is still true? In my experience, few businesses are willing to risk selling anything to underage people anymore. Hence the stupid “Challenge 25” crap.
From 1983 to 1986, West Virginia had a split drinking age: 19 for state residents and 21 for out of state residents. If a person attended a college or was employed in state, he or she could obtain a state identification card for drinking purposes.
That seems to solve the “blood borders” problem quite well.
I agree with other comments as well. When you are 18-20, you don’t enjoy a glass of wine at a nice restaurant, you drink until you puke at a frat party.
I also think that society’s views on many things changed between 1980 and 2000. I don’t think a return to the 18 year old drinking age would mean that everything goes back to ask it was in 1980.
Until about a decade ago Ontario high schools had a 13th grade.