Sep 17, 2009 -- 3:18PM, Nepenthe wrote:

Some people (smarter than me) have presented arguements that binge drinkning by underage students in college is most likely a symptom of the drinking age, and that if it were lowered to 18 or 19, much of the binge drinking would disappear. 

I dunno, based on personal experience (me in college when the drinking age was 18) I don't buy that.  But neither do I think binge drinking would be any worse if the drinking age were lowered.  It's just the tendency of that age group to get wild and crazy.

I think it will be hard to lower the age, I think the tendancy is to say leave well enough alone.

I came of age during the era of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) which I hardly hear anything from anymore.  And during that time there was ALOT of debate and carrying on that it should be OK to drink and drive.  Afterall people had been drinking and driving for years. People even claimed to drive BETTER drunk.  This is all hard to believe now.

And the penalties of driving while drunk were not that bad.  Sometimes you got arrested, sometimes the cops might just drive you home or if they didn't think you were that bad off let you drive yourself home if you were close enough.  There was no DUI felony

There was not this conciousness, a strong morality of not drinking and driving.  Now I believe a person who would admit to driving drunk is considered of low charecter.  There has been a shift in conciousness.  And I do think it is bad morality to drive drunk.  The only problem being many times drunks don't see themselvs as drunk. 

I think we have the morality shift in our favor should we choose to lower the drinking age.  I really don't care if kids want to have a party and make asses of themselves.  But I will do just about anything to prevent them from killing themselves in a car. 

If we were to lower the age I think society could adjust but I don't think we will.

The major problem with allowing 18 year olds to purchase alcohol is that it then makes it far, far easier for people in high school under 18 to get hold of alcohol. After all, being friends with a senior who is 18 is far more likely than having someone who will buy you, a minor teenager, alcohol over the age of 21.

But, as has been implied here, there is a difference between a glass of wine with dinner and binging on a couple bottles of whiskey. Likewise, there is a difference between buying and drinking alcohol. My understanding of the laws in my local area is that minors may drink alcohol IF it is given to them by their parents AND consumed on their own property. 

Consequently, as a 15-16-17 year old, I occasionally had a mixed drink or wine cooler on a Friday night while playing cards with my family, at home. 

I believe that simply lowering the drinking age would be bad. As an EMT who has responded to many alcohol-related MVAs, I know a bit what bad can be. I also know that alcohol poisoning can be a bad deal too. But one of the unfortunate truths about the collisions in particular is the fact that often the drunk driver is unhurt or only minorly injured, whereas often the people the drunk ran into suffer much greater damage. Drunks tend to stay loose in a collision (or maybe they just can't react fast enough to tense up) which actually minimizes injuries to an extent, whereas sober people tend to tense up, which can lead to worse injuries.

Just lowering the age would not, in my opinion, do anything to curb the interest in drinking by those people that would then be able to legally drink for the first time, but it would make it easier for all interested parties to get ahold of alcohol and make it more socially acceptable, which I imagine would increase bingeing and driving under the influence. 

Places (as in countries) where teenagers can legally drink are often paraded around as the model we should follow. The problem is that such places typically have a completely different context of social norms and expectations. If you are 18 and going off to college and you expect there will be binge drinking and parties, the notion that you can now do this legally is not going to dampen your interest or expectation. 

I would support more progressive sorts of options, such as allowing minors to have a drink at a restaurant or bar if purchased for them by a parent. Or a graduated drinking age that perhaps allows 19 year olds to buy a single beer or hard lemonade but not a case of either, nor hard liquor. Educating everyone about alcohol is a great idea but I really doubt that a simple class needed to get a drinking license would actually help that much. Working in food service I had to take a class on food service safety. It was made for the lowest common denominator and thus was stuff I already knew, common sense stuff. More than that, though, the final quiz was a joke... all one needed to do was memorize the correct answer and be able to spit it out, there was no internalizing of any of the information. If someone had been inclined to not wash their hands enough or cut vegetables on a board just used for raw meat, the class might have made them vaguely aware that this wasn't the way it was supposed to be done, but it would do almost nothing to get them to actually do it right. Driver's education classes may not be college anatomy, but they do at least teach things that many of the students would not know otherwise, teach habits and skills in an internalizable way, and actually test on a person's ability to do it right, not just know the right way it's supposed to be done, the right sound-byte answer. Somehow I doubt that an alcohol safety class would have a practical exam. 

Although that might be useful... have someone drink various amounts, say how drunk or not drunk they feel, then have their blood alcohol actually tested and (later, once sober) watch a video of themselves trying to solve problems at that level of intoxication, myth-buster style. That might stand a chance of being internalized. But that could get expensive to administer. 

Of course, a huge advantage of a drinking license would be being able to take it away from repeat offenders of alcohol-related misconduct. Then, you could be 42 with two DUIs and your being over 21 wouldn't matter, no place could legally sell you a drink. 

~Stalker

Satanic Stalker, I think your ideas are really good, I like the graduated idea of an 18 year old being able to buy a single beer, but not a case. Or a Parent being able to buy a glass of wine at a restaurant for their teenager and so on. That would encourage drinking responsibly, and it would take away the taboo and mystique to a certain extent.