That’s my philosophy on alcohol, and I’m sticking to it. And it’s what I couldn’t help thinking of when I read this AP story this morning about a growing movement to drop the drinking age back down to 18:
College presidents from about 100 of the nation’s best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.
The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age.
“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”
Other prominent schools in the group include Syracuse, Tufts, Colgate, Kenyon and Morehouse.
But even before the presidents begin the public phase of their efforts, which may include publishing newspaper ads in the coming weeks, they are already facing sharp criticism.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.
“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.
Both sides agree alcohol abuse by college students is a huge problem.
There is absolutely nothing sensible about a 21-year-old drinking age. In our country, 18 is the age of majority, and upon attaining that age come many rights and responsibilities. And 18-year-old can vote for the president, be drafted into the military (if male, and a draft is re-instituted) and if charged with a crime will be charged as an adult.
So why is that same individual who can pull a lever to elect the leader of the free world or carry an M-16 into battle considered too immature and foolish to drink a beer?
In part, it’s because we’ve created a monster. In addition to the manufactured condition of sustained-adolescence we’ve done such a good job encouraging in this country, raising the drinking age has gilded alcohol with all the glamor of a taboo, making it a rather dangerous proposition to now do the sensible thing and fix the law to reflect justice.
I don’t know enough about the history of this oddly-prolonged holdover of prohibition, but I’m given to understand that in countries where consumption of alcohol is cultural and arbitrary age-limits are not artificially imposed, problems of abuse by a certain age demographics drop off. (No, I didn’t trouble myself to look for statistics. Feel free.)
At the heart of this, though, is an unhealthy fear of alcohol itself. Culturally speaking, responsible drinking begins at home. Children with parents who teach them how to exercise temperance and who do not unnecessarily stigmatize the fruits of fermentation will, in my estimation, be far less likely to wind up with a high school DUI or have their stomachs pumped after a college frat party.
The practical questions of whether a change in the law could be implemented without a national binge on the part of high school seniors remains open.
You are 100% right. I see a change on this in the near future.
I agree - where I come from the age is 18. The kids who are gonna get smashed every night will do it regardless, I am sure it is the same on college campuses in the States for those under 21.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
—Constitution of the United States, Amendment 14, §1
Age-based prohibition is unconstitutional.
Schmendrick,
I thought the 14th Amendment only granted women the right to have an abortion. I never knew…
Schmendrick, that’s way over the top. Do you think we should deny drivers licenses to 10 year olds? Of course we should. Young people’s brains aren’t fully developed enough to rationally understand risk.
Is it unacceptably risky to allow a 19 year old to have a beer at a bar? Of course not. Is age-based restriction of risky activities unconstitutional? Not at all.
I happened to be in college back in the olden days when each state had it’s own drinking age. I know at least a dozen students died each year on the high way between Wahington State University (drinking age 21) and Moscow Idaho (drinking age 19). It seemed preposterous to me then, as it does to this day, that somehow an eighteen year-old is not fully adult under the law.
It’s not like the laws stop ANYONE who wants to drink from getting booze. Hell, my fifteen-year-old made his first batch of rum a while back. It was pretty good, but too strong for my taste. I ran a distillery aboard a crab processing boat in Alaska when I was 20. Underage drinking laws didn’t even slow me down.
The only way to teach people to drink responsibly is to actually teach them, when they’re teenagers, to drink without getting drunk. Once you’ve done that, most will figure out that they don’t enjoy being drunk.
Dan,
Moscow Idaho, and there were only a dozen alcohol-related student fatalities?
I spent a summer in Cottonwood, and worked in the surrounding areas (including Lewiston), and alcohol flows like a river among the hard-working folk there.
In fact, it’s where I gained my appreciation for campfires, big trucks and beer.
When were you in Cottonwood? I know some people there.
1997 - the summer before I started college. I had friends there, and lived and worked with them that summer.
Do you know the DeGoede family? I think they moved there in 2000.
Kevin,
I did not mean to extend the implications of the Fourteenth Amendment to children, though I suppose the case can be made.
I was 20 when Texas raised its drinking age from 19 to 21 — and without a grandfather clause. My father explained the logic to me at the time as follows:
The reason to raise the drinking age from 18 or 19 to 21 isn’t to affect drinking by 19 and 20 year-olds. They will have 21-year-old-friends (dorm mates, frat brothers, co-workers). They can have plausible-looking fake IDs. They can pass for 21. But none of those things are true of 16 and 17 year-olds. They mostly mix with other high-schoolers. They can’t look 21.
Social policy is necessarily imperfect, and all vice laws can be gotten around. But when shooting an arrow, you have to aim above the bull’s eye to hit the bull’s eye. If the drinking age is 21, the legally problematic years are 19-20 (i.e., on the margins of enforcement and unlikely to be prosecuted), but 15-18 is off the table; but if the drinking age is 18, the legally problematic years become 15-17.
Schmendrick wrote:
“I did not mean to extend the implications of the Fourteenth Amendment to children, though I suppose the case can be made.”
Did you not? After all, you wrote, appended to the text of the 14th Amendment that “Age-based prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Since the 14th Amendment doesn’t actually mention age, then age-based laws can only be unconstitutional as prima facie denials of equal protection of the law or the privileges and immunities clause. But then the whole adult-child distinction and every example of it are too, because the legal difference between an adult and a child is … age (whether 12, 18 or 21 is neither here nor there … ANY adult-child law discriminates on the basis of age).
S-When does a child become an adult? We may be able to vote and go to war at 18, but the brain is not really fully developed until about 25, from what I’ve heard.
The age of adulthood is culturally determined. Amongst hobbits, it seems 35 is considered adult. I think most of us would agree that’s a bit late. I know that when my Father was 13, he dropped out of school and got a job driving a truck for the Ford plant in Dearborn MI, when his stepfather died. He never took a drink till he was 19 years old, in the artillery killing Japanese (he was from a hard-line Methodist family that abhorred drink). And yet he died an alcoholic.
I had my first beer at the age of 12, and I never drink more than one drink of an evening. The age at which one takes his first drink has really has very little to with drinking patterns later in life. Rather it’s the manner in which one learns to drink that’s the determining factor. It’s not teenage drinking that we should be fighting, any more than teenage pregnancy. It’s teenage drunkenness and illegitimacy that are real problems.
Victor,
The difference between adult and child is the concept of majority. I would not argue that the Fourteenth Amendment obliterates the distinction of majority among citizens. (Though, as I said and as you exemplified, the case can be made.) The difference between an 18-year-old and a 21-year-old, however, is legally insubstantial. Prohibiting those under 21 from drinking is equivalent, for instance, to prohibiting those above the age of 70 from driving. Both would be deprivations of liberty.
The difference between adult and child is the concept of majority.
This ruins your whole argument doesn’t it?? Doesn’t the majority rule in a democracy? (I know, we’re a democratic republic, but ignore that for a second.) If a democratic government enacts a law, it generally has the backing of the majority. Therefore any law engaging in “age discrimination” against young people ipso facto reflects the majority’s concepts of child and adult, and is therefore … constitutional?
And I don’t think you’ll get away with saying an arbitrary cutoff point is arbitrary. That’s the whole point of a cut-off, isn’t it? No matter what the drinking age is, persons 1 day over and under it are going to be substantially the same.
My oldest daughter is venturing off to college tomorrow and at orientation the college recommended we start “a dialogue with our student about drinking” and that we “ask how drinking will accomplish their academic goals or impede them”.
Yeah.
This is what I told Ana, “Don’t drink at Loyola. Come home, drink all you want. ”
We encourage the teens to have a glass of wine in the evening or a wine cooler with Mom and Dad which immediately makes drinking pretty uncool.
Getting caught with a fake idea is an offense that prevent you from becoming a lawyer, teacher, doctor, etc. etc. It’s just not worth it.
Kevin:
“Majority” in Schmendrick’s post reflected the term “age of majority,” which has nothing to do with the mathematical concept of “a majority.” It means “the age you become an adult,” i.e., no longer a minor, in an “age of minority.”
That said, I still think his point is wrong. I’m saying that the very concept “age of minority” would be, in itself, a form of age discrimination, if the 14th Amendment can be used to support a claim that drinking ages are unconstitutional.
Calvinism.
‘Merica has always been handicapped by it’s Protestant heritage.
So so true Steve. I’m 19, and I drink, but not in excess. Probably because I grew up with you and Matt always telling me to try alcohol, and always telling me how i needed to appreciate it for the taste, not the inebriation. And I do; I won’t drink any alcohol I don’t like just to get a buzz, I’ll make one drink that I’ll enjoy and drink it slowly. And a lot of people my age who grew up not thinking it was a big deal are the same way. But the ones who grew up with alcohol being taboo are always going out and getting wasted at college. It certainly matters more how the family treats alcohol than how the law treats it. Because in the end, nobody really pays attention to what the drinking age is.