After reading through this thread I realized again just how weird it is that the drinking age is 21, whereas you can do everything else at 18. Why is it that way? Did people back in the seventies (which is when the legal age was raised, I believe) really think that an extra three years makes a difference? Does anyone here think they make a difference?
The current age just seems so arbitrary. Why not make the legal smoking age 21, or the driving age? To me, there seems to be no point to giving an 18-year-old all other rights, including the right to vote, the right to buy property, the right to run for certain public offices, the right to enlist in the military–and just deny them this one little thing.
I’d especially be interested in hearing from people who think we should retain the current drinking age. What is it about alcohol that makes it taboo for 18-year-olds? Again, why not raise the smoking and driving ages, too?
Hey, no argument from me. My daughter’s getting married next May, when she’ll still technically be 20, and her fiance’s family is all gung-ho to serve alcohol at the reception, but she, the lifelong CheapPerson, doesn’t wanna pay for liquor she’s not going to be allowed to consume herself. Much tension.
She can vote, join the Army, buy a house, get married, at 18, why not drink? I don’t get it either. Blame America’s fanatically “Temperance” past, I guess.
It was raised in the mid 80’s- '85, I believe. The purpose was to ostensibly curb teens drinking and driving. Pressure was put on all states to raise the age or lose highway funding.
I always thought it would have made more sense to raise the driving age and keep the drinking age where it was. It’s harder for a kid to get hold of a car than to get hold of a beer.
I’m for lowering it. It might sound cliche but it’s more than a little irrational to say that a person is old enough to die in a war but not buy a beer.
I think the rational used was the high incedence of drinking/driving accidents of the under 21 demographic. And it was motivated by a federal mandate that states don’t get highway funds if they don’t set the drinking age at 21. It was 18 most places when I was growing up.
Any age you set ends up being arbitrary. I don’t see a good reason to not set it at 18, since that is age of majority in this country.
I don’t really care if the age is 18 or 21. I just think it ought to be one or the other for everything.
It seems to me absurd to the point of insanity that an 18-year old is considered a full, legal adult, able to enter into contracts, vote in national elections, hold public office… but cannot be trusted to drink alcoholic beverages.
Either make 18 the age of majority, or 21. No exceptions.
The problem with all the valid arguments for lowering the drinking age to 18 (Or lower) in the US is that it was tried. As a part of the same movement that got the voting age lowered to 18, the drinking age across the US was lowered to 18, or even just under that in the early to mid 70’s. The problem is that the generations that had that lowered drinking age in effect went to great lengths to get it raised again. I don’t believe that highway deaths skyrocketed, but they did rise, and what was worse, drunken driving accidents involving 18-21 year old drivers were a very visible part of that rise.
Additionally, after the Federal mandate that Diogenes mentioned started raising the drinking ages again there was a decrease in drunk driving deaths by the same age group.
So, while there are rights for the affected age group involved, and legitimate rights, too, there is also a real public safety issue, too. Without changing the driving age at the same time, I don’t think it would be possible to lower the drinking age again.
Eighteen year olds do not vote so there is no motivation for politicians to lower the drinking age. They can look like they are pro-moral values while shipping these same young people off to die in Iraq and it dosen’t cost them anything.
Who’s going to tell her she can’t drink? I 10000% guarantee you that a hired bartender is not going to card her.
I’ve been to a lot of functions with hired bartenders (weddings, company picnics, company xmas parties, etc) both before and after I turned 21, and I’ve never seen anyone get carded. They tend to follow Mexican drinking laws: if you can reach the counter, you can buy it.
I wish they’d put it at 18 just for the college kids - they can’t legally drink in bars (and round about August here they start carding everybody, including a few nights ago my dear mother, who is in her sixties) so they drink at parties and in dorm rooms where I think it’s a lot less safe, both in terms of date rape and because a professional bartender will eventually cut you off. I think there would be less of an alcohol poisoning problem if the kids were drinking in bars more and at parties less.
I wish they would just get rid of the drinking age. Alcohol is part of life and Americans should stop ignoring that reality. Making alcohol a privilege of adulthood just gives adolescents that much more incentive to pursue it. Acting like a grown up is an important part of growing up. The age limit gives alcohol cachet while at the same time restraining parents from exposing their kids to it in a controlled environment. If responsible alcohol consumption for kids were permitted I’m sure it would decrease irresponsible consumption. You don’t see thousands of French kids dying from drunk driving or alcohol poisoning every prom and graduation season. Of course, they drive a lot less than us too. Another thing for us to work on.
I’m more or less in favor of changing the “age of consent” for everything (marriage, sex, gambling, drinking, driving, holding public office, getting drafted, etc, etc, etc) to 18, just so there’s some coherency in the legal system. The current mechanisms just seem so jury rigged and arbitrary that I think that as long as it’s going to be arbitrary, we might as well make it the same arbitrary age.
I’ll never give much credence to the idea that “making it for adults just makes kids want to do it more.” Yeah, that might influence them drinking as teens that one first time. But as someone who actually grew up and drank I did it for one simple reason, being drunk is fun, getting drunk is fun, period.
It’s just that simple, the reasons I drank then are the same reasons I drink now. I drink less now, but that’s because I’m old and I get tired much easier, not because I feel that drinking isn’t “cool” because I’ve been allowed to drink for so long.
IMNA…qualified individual of any variety, but aren’t there compelling biological arguements against drinking before the age of 25? There’s a guy at Duke University, Dr. Scott Swartzwelder, who has been studying the effects of a variety of drugs on adolescents and he says that the human brain is affected quite differently by alcohol at younger ages. So this should be reframed as an argument around chemistry, not around personal responsiblity issues, i.e., driving, voting, fighting, and marriage. See following cites for more info…
AND…
High levels of drinking among adolescents are particularly troubling given recent evidence that, in contrast to long-held assumptions, a tremendous amount of structural and functional brain development takes place during the teenage years (Geidd et al., 1999; for review see Spear, 2000;2002). Evidence is accruing that alcohol, and perhaps other drugs, impact brain function and behavior differently during adolescence than during adulthood. Further, preliminary data suggest that adolescents might be more vulnerable than adults to impairments following repeated alcohol exposure