Posted on 04/23/2014 9:26:44 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who with all good intentions were wrongly intruding into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing 19th-century Temperance crusaders, typified by Carrie Nation smashing beer barrels with her hatchet. Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14 years of Prohibition. That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze smuggling, laying the groundwork for today’s global drug trade. Thanks a lot, Carrie!
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This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
They aren’t. But they want the age to legally smoke weed to be 18. That will necessitate a change to the drinking laws.
I remember the blackmail. I really reside MADD.
I was discussing this with a friend not too long ago, also the issue of raising the voting age to 21. From a number of studies that I have read, an individual’s brain is not fully mature until early to mid 20’s.
The ability to truly identify long-term consequences of one’s actions is one of the last mental capacities to develop fully. (And this is probably the single most frustrating thing about raising children, things that seem obvious to the average adult are utterly alien to the child, though it gradually develops as he/she ages.)
If these studies are correct, that would make 18-yr-olds much better soldiers, able to focus exclusively on the present and not troubled by possible consequences of their actions, increasing their reaction time and survival potential in war. That same trait has a negative influence in making decisions involving alcohol or voting where the long term consequences are key factors in the decision. Just something to think about.
Despise MADD not reside. Darned tablet.
One could just as easily say, "You can be 17 years and 364 days old and it is still illegal for you to star in a porn movie. In fact, if you did, you were breaking the law and so was anybody else who was making the movie with you. Yet the very next day, on your 18th birthday, you can now legally walk into a bedroom and have all the sex the camera can capture. What sense does that make?"
A society that proscribes children engaging in certain activities is compelled to draw an arbitrary line. When the line is drawn, there will be those on one side of the line who perhaps should be able to engage in the activity, but can't, and those on the other side of the line who should not be able to engage in the activity, but can. There are 12-year-olds who could responsibly drink wine at the dinner table, and 30-, 40-, 50-, and 60-year-olds who should never touch the stuff. A society of virtuous people would not need a government drawing the line, but if we were ever a society of virtuous people, we have long since lost that distinction.
Push the drinking age back to 18, and around 2,000 people annually will die in teen DUI accidents who are not dying now, based on how many died before the age was raised to 21. OTOH, a few hundred million dollars will not be spent on underage-drinking enforcement that is being spent now. If we wanted to, and were willing to use whatever means were necessary, we could use that money to essentially rid Africa of malaria, or rid India of cholera, and save many more than 2,000 lives--but that would require first the willingness to say that lives in Africa and India are as worthwhile as those in the US, second the willingness to allow older teens to live, or die, with the consequences of their own, sometimes immature choices, and third the ensuring that the money saved from the non-enforcement of "21" would actually go into effective programs to save those who are in danger of malaria or cholera. Those are three big "if"s, and if a society is not virtuous enough to handle individual choice in alcohol, it certainly would not be virtuous enough to handle the three "if"s.
I feel like I am pretty consistent in my views and this is no exception. When I was younger I thought 21 was a ridiculous age, and I still do today. It was much better at 19. As another poster mentioned, 18 has some real downside because seniors in high school are often 18 and we know alcohol will be bought freely for everyone down to 14 in that scenario. A shift to 19 makes sense.
I was legal when I turned 18, yet when I turned 19 the changed went into effect so I was not legal again. that was the eighties
I guess the ‘Drunks Against Mad Mothers” are organizing!
19 is the legal drinking age in Ontario Canada. Not sure about the other provinces in Canada.
As with just about anything (i.e. riding a bike, driving a car), you need to get your "training wheels" and "driving experience" before becoming a competent and responsible bicyclist or motorist.
Having a hard rule of "21" does nothing to prepare one for drinking responsibly. You could argue that it is the parents responsibility to train their children on responsible drinking in the home but they would be breaking the law. In fact, parents have gone to jail because they allowed under age drinking in their own homes.
So now we have this situation where turning 21 is a rite of passage where the individual goes off with a group of his friends to "tie one on." That is no way to be introduced to drinking.
There was no reason for it. Some idiot control freaks wanted more control. Phased adulthood is idiotic, they’re adults or they aren’t. There’s simply no logical reason for driving, voting, and drinking to have different ages.
ok...just checked legal drinking age of 19 in all provinces but 3. Quebec Alberta and Manitoba are at 18.
New Jersey tried the 18 drinking age in the 70s, reducing the legal age from 21 to 18 in ‘73. After a few years of bars, clubs and taverns (not to mention highways) becoming buckets of blood, the age was returned to 21 in 1983.
In 1984 the national 21 was passed, largely by the efforts of Frank Lautenburg (D-NJ), who was appalled that 18-20 year olds took off for New York to drink and got killed a lot.
My kids drank at home under my supervision at every celebratory event from the age of 12 or so. They had wine/water mix at the table at celebratory events from the time they could hold a wine glass. If the teens wanted to try a specific beer or spirit I would purchase it and we would sample.
It demystified alcohol and helped them integrate ETOH use into their lives.
I remember my son telling me that he sort of laughed up his sleeve at his friends who would get a bottle of ETHOH and drink it and treat it like contraband. He said: I know that I can come home and ask for a drink if I wanted it and I would get it. I am so much freer than they are.
If anything these laws make people less responsible in their drinking. This taboo attitude prevents the most important part of being a responsible drinker: practice. Drinking is like anything else we do with/ to our body, the only way to learn to do it to do it. You can’t learn how alcohol effects your judgement and co-ordination sober, you can’t learn how your body dries out without giving it something to dry out, you can’t learn the difference in effect of drinking with food or without without drinking. If we really want responsible drinkers then we need to start them drinking younger not older, phase them into it, demystify, with adult supervision. The places that culturally encourage mild drinking (the ever popular wine with dinner) in the family circle have a lot fewer problems. Of course it also doesn’t help that our drivers licenses come out of cracker jack boxes, but that’s a whole other rant.
We can’t assume the change in drinking age was the sole cause of reductions in DUI. There was a major cultural change during that same era in regards to DUI, in the 70s and early 80s there was an assumption of drinking and driving, drinking while driving even. I had neighbors that judged driving trips by 6 packs, and nobody thought it was a big deal, it was just how things went. We don’t think that way anymore, plus there’s much more draconian DUI laws to make sure even the people that want to think that way don’t. And vehicle technology has improved dramatically making crashes safer. I doubt there will be any increase in DUI fatalities with a lower drinking age, the drinking age really doesn’t prevent drinking by the young, it just moves it to darker corners of the world.
More like “Teen Stoners for Getting Stoned”.
Another overreach by the FedMob. It should be a state issue.
Unless they're illegal aliens ...
The teen DUI lives you think you would "save" by deferring the drinking age from 18 to 21 are just going to be snuffed out at age 22 rather than 19.
Make the drinking age 25 and those who can't handle it would die at 26.
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