Raise the drinking age
 

I am in the processes of writing a letter to the La Crosse Tribune, City Council, and posting this letter on community bulletin boards all over the city. I am proposing raising the city age of consumption to 25, and suggesting stiff mandatory penalties for violators. These will include, mandatory jail time for first offenders, including the people who are buying alcoholic beverages for minors, and permanent loss of liquor licences for the retailers and wholesalers, of these beverages.
This has been brought on by another death of a young man, on the Mississippi levee at Riverside Park. He was only 21, and had a BA of .26. The city is in an uproar just last year another young man died, in the same area under the same circumstances.
The UW-L, Vitterbro, and WWTC are silent, just the usual poor baby statements and candle lite vigil. The local OctoberFest has become a reason for binge drinking among the population.
The madness must stop, before others are wasted needlessly. I am doing this as a concerned citizen, I don't want to be an a$$hole...

better put on your flamesuit.. its going to get toasty in here
:flamer:

I for one wouldn't mind raising the drinking age to 22-23, just so a majority of college age people can't legally drink and get wasted and do all the horrible things that ensue.

I'm 19; I've been drinking pretty much whenever I want (which, admittedly, does not fall under "college age people getting wasted") for the past 2ish years.

Getting booze when you're underage is not hard. It's only sketchy if you have to solicit non-friends; in any other situation, it's pretty much completely safe, legally, within the general bounds of "don't make a scene, break shit, or get hurt & nobody will ask questions."

Now, again, I'm a relatively unambitious drinker & like to keep a low profile anyway; but nevertheless, I know (of) a great many underaged kids who drink to excess on a regular basis. Sure, they get written up or what-have-you, but their age is not stopping them.

So, I ask: what would raising the minimum age accomplish? Changing the legality of an action does not directly prevent people from doing it; it only discourages them. And that discouragement is a remarkably punitive one. I suspect that, with a fair deal more work, a more fundamental sort of solution could be found (and, ultimately, politically more feasible one: anyone between 21 and the new drinking age will resist the change, along with the majority of drinking establishments.)

Consider what the root cause of the drinking problem is: I doubt that it is age. We live in a culture that handles alcohol poorly, both in terms of how we ingest it and how we educate our children about it. (In France, children are gradually introduced to drinking wine w/ dinner from a young age (12ish?); there is a strong social stigma attached to being shitfaced in public. Here it generally just shrugged about.)

I have a problem with politicians making it illegal to drink until 21 while it is mandatory to kill at 18. It makes no sense whatever to sign a kid into the military and send him off to waste others at an age when he "isn't old enough" to buy cigarettes, booze, or "adult entertainment" and, until very recently, was not even a full citizen because he couldn't vote for or against the people doing this to him.

Nevertheless, idiots are going to drink no matter what the legal age is. And Americans will continue to send grief counselors to schools and hold candelight vigils instead of teaching kids to be responsible and jailing the drivers who aren't to keep them away from the rest of us.

Personally, I think it isn't the age of the people who drink, but the culture of drinking they grow up in. This is not a criticism of American culture - we have a similar problem here.

Ideally, children should be introduced to the concept of social drinking as early as possible. Parents who take their children out to restaurants, or have the odd glass of wine with the family meal teach their offspring to drink responsibly.

The US currently has the highest legal drinking age in the world. I don't think raising it will help teach a more responsible attitude to consumption, it will just drive it underground, as did Prohibition.

America has a culture of binge drinking and it is somewhat due to "forbidden fruit" due to the age 21 limit putting all kinds of additional psychological layers on it. Raising it to 25 will increase, not decrease the problem.

People must be free to make their own choices, even if they are poor choices.

I'm with Sundae Girl. I think its cultural and therefor, dont think altering the legal age will change a thing.

I often wonder whether lowering the age limit over there might have more of a positive impact?
I mean, you lower the drinking age limit and let these 18-19 year olds into clubs/pubs....are they more likely to party *sensibly* in a *controlled* environment, than they would be sneaking around someones house and thinking up dumbshit to do??

My parents introduced us all to drinking at a early age. If Mum or Dad went to the bottleshop, we were asked what we would like to try, 1 can was bought and we were encouraged to drink it with the rest of the family.

Legal drinking age here is 18.

I always thought it was a bit dumb to have these teenagers, become *adults*, get their license, drink legally and vote...ALL on the same birthday.

ditto

As Sundae said, parents should teach their kids to drink responsibly when they are young.

The thing that kept me from (most) drinking during college -- my dad had given me the taste for good wine and good beer when I was still a teenager. Damn hard to find the good stuff at frat parties.

For me, this is another case of "its not someone else's fault if some damn kid goes and drinks himself to death". I'm personally against alcohol in general, but I'm also against having a drinking age. Or at least raising the one thats already in place.

I wonder if it isn't worse in the States because we claim people are responsible for their actions, but continue to write law and adjudicate cases that fly in the face of that claim?

If anything should be done with the drinking age, it should be lowered. And parents should teach their kids from a young age.

I've read studies supporting that idea. It makes sense. This article explains that theory in greater length:

http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/articles/fruit.html

Decriminalization can do much to change the ideas of youth culture. Let's make getting a library card or going to a bookstore illegal until age 21. Those kids might fall all over themselves getting the forbidden books!

Replacing alcohol with marijuana would be a big improvement. It's not lethal, doesn't ruin your liver, I've heard that it doesn't give you lung cancer, and people get mellow and stupid using it, not aggressive and stupid. :2cents:

I'd be all for that.. beats having thousands of girls assaulted and raped on campuses every year because of alcohol.

Just for accuracy: if you're smoking it (whatever 'it' is), you'll more than likely get increase your risk for cancer because you're inhaling smoke (which is bad for you). On top of that, most of the time you're (the generic you, not Spexxvet in particular) smoking unfiltered stuff which is, in a lot of ways, worse for you than tobacco.
All that being said, smoke a bong, and a lot of that goes away.... :bong:

A bong is still mostly unfiltered smoke. It's just cooler.

Hmmm...I wonder if you could market a bong with a filter???
Business opportunity anyone?

Society allows people to increase their risk of cancer via tobacco, so that shouldn't stand in the way of replacing alcohol with marijuana.

Except it won't help the current trend towards obesity....

I'm all for reducing the crime and stupidity that goes with drinking, and if there was a way to eliminate any and all mind-altering substances, I'd say go for it.

BUT YOU CAN'T LEGISLATE THINGS OUT OF EXISTENCE. Not guns, not weed, not booze, not liberals, not emo music, not fat people wearing lowrider jeans.

It just can't ever happen. And the longer we try to make it happen, the more money and time we waste, and the further we get from solving the root cause for people's dysfunctional behavior: idiocy.

I'd like to raise my glass to this thread.

Including all the anti-depressants and anti-psychotics? Me thinks you should reformulate that blanket statement ;)

Which glass? The stein or the sherlock?

How about Pot Pills? No lung cancer. Sell them in the liquor store. Alcohol problems will be reduced, just cause of the competition.

It depends...Marinol doesn't really work at all (I have a friend who's both a regular smoker and a recovering cancer patient, and I know what he used when he was really illin'). I've heard that real THC pills from the Continent are fun, but have never tried them.

Well, I think Fargon's mandatory jail time for first offenders is not going to be wildly popular with ANYONE. You're only going to increase the prison population, probably forcing your county to use tax payer dollars to build a bigger jail, and you're going to expose young ppeople to a criminal element that they might not otherwise meet - a bad idea IMO.

Drunk drivers OVER age 25 still kill themselves and other people in huge numbers. Colorado has put some pretty strict DUI laws into effect, and this has reduced the carnage at least somewhat.

I started drinking at age 18, mainly because I hung out with a bunch of older graduate students. It was no problem for me to get alcohol. I suspect that is still true today. Teach responsible drinking as others have said, and strictly enforce the drunk driving laws. That makes the most sense to me. :neutral:

I'm tempted to say that I stick by the blanket statement -- after all, even antidepressants, etc. are really just bandaids for bigger problems. Plus, your body sees drugs as poison, and whatever effect you get is essentially your body telling you, "what the fuck?"

Of course, any discussion of this kind is going to get into a bunch of lame chemistry and pharmacological minutae that I don't care about. So. Let's start with meth. Eliminating meth would be a good thing.

Edit: we could probably get rid of anything that results in pages like this as well. I hate talking to people who think they're on a higher spiritual plane than everyone else just because they're on drugs. Although, this is a pretty informative site.

Not all drugs are poison, and your body doesn't react to the them that way. But, let's not get into biopharmacology. If you don't believe me, then you'll have to prove that that's how all drugs work, but I promise, it isn't. And frankly, sometimes there is a brain imbalance that can only be fixed with drugs (also of note is that the most effective treatment for severe, recurrent depression is both drugs and therapy).
Yes. Meth is bad, bad shit. Stick with pill-based speed ;)
Yeah, there's some stupid stories on Erowid (though some of them are accurate descriptions of what happens to your state of mind and your state of body, even if they don't make sense outside of the experience). But for a single, fact-filled info site on just about every drug imaginable, I can't think of any site better.

Unless you vomit, aspirate, and choke, a BAL of .26 isn't going to kill you.

Mostly that's called "just getting started" or "a really good party."

I have seen folks with BALs upwards of .400 walking and talking. The .500-.600+ range gets a little chancy in terms of possible death, but I've also seen that survived.

It's a damn sight harder to kill yourself with alcohol (quickly) than most people think. Long term attrition, including liver and brain damage can be pretty high.

I was entering college at the time the drinking age in North Carolina was phased in from 18 to 21. Call it anecdotal if you will, but I'm convinced the change just made campus drinking problems worse--it certainly didn't make them better.

In general I'm not in favor of a lot of age-related restrictions on things. For the most part, numbskulls I went to junior high school with were still numbskulls in high school, and in college, and on and on. If we think somebody cannot make a responsible decision at age 21, why on earth would we think they'd necessarily change by age 25? And yes, I realize there's a reductio ad absurdum here where I'd be letting 3-year-olds drive cars and smoke pot. 18 or 21, either way is arbitrary to a certain extent. But you just can't continually argue and say that because there are things a 21yo should be allowed to do that a 17yo shouldn't, then it also makes sense for 25yo vs. 21yo--and there you get the opposite absurdity where none of us would be voting or entering into contracts until we were 110.

It's been a LONG time since I've found smoke good enough to put me on a higher spiritual plane. :D

The only positive thing I've seen from having the legal age at 21 is that it keeps the fact that serving alchohol to freshmen is technically an illegal activity in the mind of the frat houses that otherwise don't give a shit as to whether you drink yourself into a coma. Most frats here run parties with the goal of turning a profit and usually sell drinks bar-style, so if you're concious enough to stick your hand over the counter with money in it they'll hand you whatever you want. They think twice about freshmen in that situation however because they can get charged with serving minors if that person then stumbles out the door into a cop who then asks where they got the booze. :2cents:

i can hook you up some kif.

JUST KIDDING, THERAPY AND/OR PROBATION OFFICER WHO MIGHT BE READING MY INTERNETS

Prank caller! Prank caller!

:D

Ladies and gentlemen, l'll be brief.

The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or... took a few liberties with our female party guests.
We did.
But you can't hold a. whole fraternity responsible for the beha.viour of... a few sick, perverted individuals.
If you do... shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty... then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general?
(Deltas cheering)
I put it to you, Greg. Isn't this an indictment of our entire American society?
Well...
you can do what you want to us...
but we won't sit here...
and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

Gentlemen!

Unfortunately the political element has spoken, "we do not have the rite to hold people accountable for their actions" my letter was rejected.

Toga! Toga!

Lower to 18. You can vote and kill for your country, you can have a legal beer.

21 pushes drinking out of public bars and clubs to house parties. Its already illegal so who cares! Party! In my residential, University area neighborhood I've witnessed the common vandalism, arson, assault, paddy wagon round ups and the annual missing drunk kid that winds up dead in the river.
Lower the drinking age and allow, encourage, adults to be adults.

The problem that always strikes when you lower it to 18 is that high schoolers turn 18 sometime during their senior year, meaning alcohol is suddenly as easy for underage high school freshmen to obtain as it currently is for underage college freshmen to obtain. (For a brief time the age was actually 19 to try to counteract this, but it didn't really help.)

I say, if it's not going to be 21, then it ought to be 12. Everything in between means all of the taboo fun with none of the safeguards.

And to cut down on drunk driving, a mandatory bar every two blocks - within crawling distance of home.

Well, here's one reason to consider them.

Of course, if MJ improves brain function, how come GWB isn't smarter (or is that 'more smarter').:rolleyes:

dang it rich! I just found that article and was thinking "sweet here's something the Cellar would like to see" but nooooo!

yeah thats a trip ain't it.. kinda the opposite of what you'd think would become of the stereotypical pot-heads.. all groggy and crap.

The POTUS was a coke head, with all the negative stereotypes that implies, not a pot head.

The only thing a raised drinking age would do is more money from tickets and a very unhappy group of teenagers.

Raising the age to 25 would make for minors to buy alcohol but that just makes things worse. If you keep something from someone and tell them it's bad, when they actually do get it they will abuse it more often and worse then not holding them from it. I wouldn't be suprised in more alcohol related deaths and alcohol abuse if the drinking age is raised.

Raising the drinking age will only create more problems. The sooner we allow people to drink in an controlled enviorment (bars) and away from uncontrolled enviorments (house parties), alcohol related problems will decrease.

Here some info:

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/inju...countries.html

Trust me, bars are not controlled environments by any stretch of the imagination.

Opposed to a house party where no one will call the cops if something goes wrong?

When you look at the actual volume of alcohol consumed between the two settings, there's no contest. Not that I approve, but there is a greater likelihood of the drunk sleeping over at the house party, where that option is not available at the bar, and the dumbass drives to his or her bed. Bartenders flag people based on their own assessment of an individual's level of drunkenness, not on a tested blood alcohol level. I know from experience that people can seem absolutely fine, not be obviously AOB (alcohol on breath) and blow into that little tube and ring the bell at .150 or better. Add other drug use to that, and a person's level of impairment is increased beyond the testable BAL. Yes, I've been in bars that have the green-yellow-red test your BAL for a quarter at the door machine. They didn't last long ... it's one heck of a party game to see who can get it to go highest. More fun that the automatically scoring dart machine or the Shuffle-Bowl table, that's for sure.

Actually it makes all the sense in the world. The reasoning behind both rules is the same: They aren't old enough to think straight. Ask the veterans here if they think most 25-30 year olds would make good recruits. "Drop and give me 20? Up yours, chief." You don't get as much of that from teens.

Trust me, if 30 year old men made the best soldiers, that's who would be recruited.

Since I've been painting a lot I see people's personalities as being like paint: As infants we're wet paint, we don't know anything and we can be pretty much spread all over.

As we get to be teens we dry tack free, but are still pretty soft and a thumbprint will leave a permanent mark. By our 20s 30s we're a mostly cured paint film, but a thumbnail can still make a small ding in the surface. By 50 or 60 we're a pretty hard paint film that is going to crack or chip before it bends or gets dinged. 60 and beyond that paint is as hard as it's gonna get.

Dunno, maybe I should switch to something with fewer VOCs?

All I have to say is...

...Sushi Pants.

EDIT: in response to Wolf, that is.

Drunk driving will not change much if it is at a house party or at a bar. Many people will go to two or more house parties a night where they driving usually longer distances than bar hopping. You can also get a taxi ride home if you are at a bar but that won't happen if you are at a house party because taxis cost a hell of a lot more and it is more inconvienent, not mentioning the fact that a majority of people at house parties are underaged and will not want to call attention to themselves for being drunk.

I'll still admit that drunk driving may go down by raising the drinking age because of your reason but it will still not drown out the goods or lowering the drinking age.

I miss Riti Sped.

Yeah, it's a pity she's gone... and Slow Children At Play hasnt updated in forever and a half, too.

Ibram: great site! :rotflol:

Austin Road Trip is my favorite.

Adult is adult is adult... should be all or nothing. If you can die for your nation, vote, etc, you can buy a beer. End of story.
Damn backward-ass blue laws make us look like a bunch of idiots every day.

Bouncer for three years.... controlled chaos was about it.

Sushi was the thing that ruined it for that guy. He should've gotten some fries or something. I made the same mistake on a business trip awhile back. I had decided at some point that it was a red wine night, and the hors doeuvres table was mostly California rolls. Mmm. Room temperature sushi.

I got back to the hotel room at about 11 to freshen up and get my second wind. What happened instead was carnage. Luckily I had removed my clothes for a shower. I sat on the toilet, felt a rumble, thought "omg", and within 30 seconds of sitting, had coated the entire bottom half of the bathroom (including the shower curtain..ew) in red wine and raw fish. It looked like a shotgun suicide. Took about as long to clean up, too.

My roommate got in about 30 minutes later, but he went to bed instead of coming out for round 2 of the evening's festivities. It's hard to be a rockstar by yourself.

The biggest problem with alcohol (drinking) is that "most" people can't handle their liquor when they become "drunk." I won't even go into drinking and driving - that is just plain stupidity. I have seen so many people get beligerent, angry, violent, obscene. It really is ridiculous! They don't know what they are doing to other people. For the younger folks, it is peer pressure. Personally, I never went for that excuse. To me, it means they are to big a pussy to stand up for what they believe is the right think to do. I told my two daughters to follow there gut feelings. If it wasn't right then get away from it. It worked for them when dealing with boys - and I mean BOYS!

They really should raise the drinking age to about 25. Then for those who decide to challenge the system you make them clean barns or port-a-potties. Young people don't seem to care about the consequences of their actions. To many of them have the idea that if they get into trouble - no problem! "Mommy and Daddy" will bail me out.

Drinking in high school is to be cool.
Drinking in college is to fit in.

The problems with teenage drinking is not in the alcohol but a larger sociological problem. Teenagers haven't been able to feel the full consequences of their actions because no one is enforcing the rules. Parents allow their kids to do anything and pamper them while they drag in the dead body. If parents would only teach their kids how to drink safely and allow them to realize that they have limits and how to find them we wouldn't need a drinking age. The reality of that is very slim and it is only getting worse.

I just don't see how raising the drinking age to 25 will do anything.

Then everything else about being an adult need to move too... adult is adult.
If you can send them off to war, or vote for the president, they can buy a damn beer, you don't have to like it, it is what is right.