The American Drinking Age
Offline The drinking age as 21 is totally irrational. What a random number to pick from a hat! We all know people can smoke cigarettes and go to war at 18, but having a sip of alcohol at a bar? Nope.
It's completely ridiculous.
First of all, people need to be educated about alcohol and misuse. This could help prevent drunk driving incidents.
I have a strong notion that many teens/college students get "wasted" partly because alcohol is illegal. If you make something illegal, it becomes more elusive, especially if it is age-based. Teens are more likely to buy kegs since alcohol is harder for them to get. They stock up, invite their friends over, and pretty soon there's a drinking party.
In Switzerland, the drinking age is 16 for beer/wine and 18 for hard liquor. Switzerland's economy is excellent, their youth are well educated, and their drunk driving incidents aren't nearly as bad as ours. This could be for many other reasons, including the fact that many towns are closer together so driving isn't always necessary, but still.
My friend from Israel told me, yes teens still drink in his country, but people don't take alcohol as seriously. Kids drink with parents and learn from an early age it's not a big deal, something adults do and not all that exciting. This is just personal experience, but I can't help but notice American young adults are far more alcohol-obsessed than Europeans in terms of drinking heavily.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
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Evidently alcohol consumption requires more thought than the future of the nation.
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Well, nobody said America's social policies were logical. Consider:
* To my knowledge, there's never been one traffic fatality in America attributed to pot, and pot is illegal.
* You can buy cigarettes at 18 (or 19, depending on the state) and cigarettes always give off second hand smoke, which is definitely dangerous, but cigarettes are legal.
* You can drive at 16 in America, and only have to pass one simple test. The stats are clear -- teen drivers are MUCH more dangerous than any other age group, and kill many more people, without alcohol being in the equation.
* You can vote at 18 and join the military. More bluntly, the government considers you old enough to pick up a gun, aim it at another person and shoot them.
* You can get married at 18, make a baby, and be totally trusted by the government to look out for the welfare of that little human without any interference.
But... if you drink a beer, you'll turn into a raving lunatic, unable to control yourself. But... if you're 21, you'll be responsible about it, since um...
hmmm..
Come to think of it, there isn't a single milestone between 18 and 21. The government thinks alcohol is so freakishly dangerous that it ranks above driving, voting, smoking, and shooting other humans in terms of the age of responsibility. Sounds like a scam to me.
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I still think a large part of it is the puritanical influence. What non-Moselem country ever had an equivalent of prohibition?
Another problem is the number of people who die on their 21st birthday - through accident or alcohol poisoning. Now even if it still happened at 18 - 18 shots are a bit less dangerous than 21 (a popular tradition in the US is to drink 21 shots of liquor on your 21st birthday. ) I'm not too far from age 35 right now, and still think 21 is stupid. I remember in college before spring break seeing the ads for destinations for students to go for it - the popular Florida ones, and the more affordable local New Jersey and Delaware most prominent - but I remember seeing ones for Canada - they had small print advertising skiing and such ( "Spring" break is usually in late Winter ) but in large, boldface type "LEGAL DRINKING AGE IS 18. "
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First, do you have any stats as to the number of people this happens to? I couldn't find any in a cursory web search, but I can't imagine it's that high.
Second, is it now illegal to die in a stupid way? This isn't a problem for the law. It's a problem for parents who raised children stupid enough to take 21 shots.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Didn't see it on the web, but it's in the news every so often. It was pretty commonly done around the time I turned 21 (I didn't do it. ) It's on shows like 20/20 every so often too.
It's mentioned as happening "often" here.
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I live in one of the biggest college party cities in the nation, and I can't remember a single death from 21 birthday shots in the last decade. I suspect this is a media scare tactic.
As you've mentioned, the "war on alcohol" has extremely moralistic overtones, and a lot of media attention focuses on scaring parents into thinking that their kids are doing horrible immoral things, and alcohol is to blame.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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I actually agree. In my psychology class we discussed that people may well be born with a predisposition towards alcoholism or any other dependence. It made more sense when I thought of it that way.
Prohibition demonstrated eloquently the hazardous consequences of making drugs and alcohol illegal. People will still buy it, probably in larger quantities and under more dangerous conditions, and the demand will be higher because people want what they can't have.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
... but these are all extrapolated from the US figures. The calculation was already made - you're just doing it backwards.
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The drinking age is something that get tossed around as a very emotive topic. They lowered the age here from 20 to 18 a few years back and there are many anecdotes that this has led to more issues around binge drinking and calls to raise the age. I notice a lot of younger drinkings out, but then I'm getting older so the crowd will appear younger anyway.
My thinking is that the issue is not so much the 18 year olds going nuts, it is the 16 year old that are breaking the law that cause the larger issues. But that thought is largely based on anecdotal evidence. A lot of the binge drinking culture I think stems back to the prohibition movement and the 6 o'clock swill and it seems to transferred to the next generation. Perhaps the better solution is to introduce a graduated system, 18 you can drink at a pub, 20 you can buy from a off license. But the key think it make sure the desired outcomes are defined and measures before and after any change.
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That's definitely not the case in my neck of the woods. (I live in the southeast U.S.) I'm not saying 16 year olds don't drink, but concerned citizens are much more worried about 18-20 year old college students, because they're the ones getting into college bars with fake IDs.
By the way, it's interesting to note that many irate letters to the editors talk about how dangerous binge drinking is, and while I'm not going to argue the point, I will point out that I haven't seen any studies mentioning the rate of incidence among 18-20 year olds as compared to 21+ year olds. My suspicion is that the rate of incidence isn't significantly different. Put another way, from everything I've seen, there's no reason to suspect that 18-20 year olds would suffer more or worse effects from binge drinking than anyone else.
The question of how much binge drinking they would do is open to some debate, and I admit i don't know the answer. My suspicion is that because we as a culture spend so much time villifying alcohol consumption, a lot of teenagers abuse it out of a sense of rebellion. However, it is also true that teenagers have a much higher sense of immortality than older people, so I wouldn't say that rebellion would be the only significant contributor to higher frequencies of binge drinking in teens.
Having said all of that, I strongly suspect that with complete access to all the raw data, we would discover that all the legal effort put into preventing 18-20s from drinking and punishing those who serve them is not nearly worth the gain realized from decreased binge drinking.
I'm pretty sure that someone mentioned Germany's system earlier, which is kind of like that. It seems to work well.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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After rereading my post, it's a little unclear. I mean to say that binge drinking is often cited as a huge evil. What I haven't seen is stats on how often after binge drinking, something bad happens. I suspect it's not that often. Most of the binge drinkers I've known tend to go to sleep after drinking, not go out and rape some girl.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I have another theory
Not entirely true... the choice is to drive, or not drive.
Which...
...leads to my theory
The problem is not with the transportation system, the problem is with the liquor establishments.
The bars are OBVIOUSLY not serving enough alcohol... if people can walk out, then SOMEBODY isnt doing their job, and therefore endangering the lives of others...
Which is why i vote to pass a bill that adds a manditory drinks limit on all bars.
(self serving laws ftw ^_^ )
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BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Firstly, Americans are just stupid. Our schools are horrible, college educations are getting more and more expensive, and the way we raise our children is completely flipped. Now for my view. From a medical standpoint, we shouldn't drink, smoke, or do harmful drugs at all, but if I had to put an age that is medically acceptable I would say 25. That is when the brain is fully developed and functional. From a psychological standpoint, you can condition an adolescent person do be logical and reasonable at a fairly young age, say 16 or 18. Germany does it, and so do many other European countries. Anyway I hope I helped.
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