The Drinking Debate
The Amethyst Initiative is designed to bring the debate over lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18 to the forefront in 2009. As hard as it may be to believe, educators from colleges across the country actually support dropping the drinking age.
They claim that doing so would curb the desire for binge drinking among their students. Opponents say that raising the drinking age created a drop in the number of drunken driving fatalities.
One of the typical arguments about why the drinking age should be lowered really ticks me off. It goes something like this:
“If an 18-year-old can join the military and die for his country, he ought to be able to drink.”
That is one of the stupidest lines of reasoning I’ve ever heard.
For one thing, the military teaches discipline and responsibility. Chugging a beer does not.
But let’s apply that same logic with a similar argument: one might argue that driving a car carries great responsibility. It certainly should be left to responsible people. In North and South Dakota, a driver with a beginner’s permit can legally drive alone as early as 14 1/2 years of age.
So if, by those states’ laws, someone 14 1/2 is legally-responsible enough to drive a car, why doesn’t that mean that he should be legally-responsible enough to be shipped overseas into a warzone and potentially die for his country?
If we’re going to compare totally unrelated things and pretend that they’re identical, then let’s go all out! The youngest age that any state suggests a child can do anything “grown up” ought to be the universal age at which he should be able to do all things “grown up,” right?
So forget about sending them to high school…just pluck them up right out of middle school and ship them off to a Quonset hut somewhere before they know what hit ‘em. And don’t forget to pack plenty of beer so they can take their minds off the irrational logic over why being able to do one thing ought to automatically mean being able to do something else that’s totally different.
Any parents out there jumping for joy at that thought? Didn’t think so. Because there’s a reason that different things are appropriate at different ages.
If I ever have kids and they want to attend a college that supports lowering the drinking age just because it doesn’t want to deal with educating its students about alcohol dangers or with enforcing alcohol rules on campus, I’d have a real hard time paying tuition there. They sure don’t sound capable of sending a good message to kids as far as I’m concerned.
Welcome to Patrick’s Place, home of the Saturday Six, the Sunday Seven and Monday’s Morals. Patrick is a television producer, writer, Mac lover, and Christian, though not necessarily in that order. He has a natural dislike of double standards and poor grammar.
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I’ve heard the argument expressed that the driving age and drinking age should be reversed. Let the kids spend a couple of years getting some experience with alcohol before you trust them to make decisions about their competence behind the wheel after a few beers.
After five years running around in a rig dealing with alcohol abuse, spousal/child abuse directly related to drinking, and too many motor vehicle collisions to count, the drinking age should be around 40 – MAYBE. That may still be too low. There is no magic age at which learns responsibility with controlled substances. Some will; some won’t. It is really that simple.
But lowering it? And yes, saying that the drinking age should match the sign up into the armed forces age is ludicrous. A truly stupid argument.
Aislinge
I disagree with you 100% about the comparison of drinking age to military age. No one other than you has ever suggested that we should lower the drinking age because it teaches discipline and responsibility. You completely ignore the REAL point that people make when they say that anyone old enough to serve in the military is old enough to drink.
A civilized nation does not send children to war, it sends adults. That seems self-evident to me. Therefore, anyone serving in the military is by definition, an adult and not a child. Being in the military means that one faces a very real risk of dieing or suffering servious injury and lifelong disability. It also means that one may have to KILL other human beings. That’s pretty
serious stuff. Anyone whom we consider mature enough that we are willing to put them in kill or be killed environment is surely mature enough to choose whether or not to drink alcohol.
Your position seems to be that it takes less maturity to face death and to deal out death than is required to handle drinking in a responsible way. That is ludicrous beyond belief. If you truly believe that 18 year olds don’t have the maturity to handle drinking, fine. But you’d darn well better be a proponent of raising the minimum age for military service to 21 or above. If you aren’t ready to raise the military age then I don’t see how you can claim there is any logic at all behind your belief about the drinking age. If someone is old enough to carry a rifle into a war zone, they’re old enough to carry a beer.
Bill,
I don’t “completely ignore” the REAL point. Instead, I find that there is no magical age at which one person should be able to suddenly do absolutely everything.
A civilized nation doesn’t send children to war? I’d agree with you on that. But what’s an adult? Really: what age is someone truly a full-fledged adult?
Whatever age you believe that age to be, 16, 18, 21, whatever it is, why isn’t that the magic age in which they can begin driving on their own, AND voting on their own, AND drinking on their own, AND serving in the military.
I don’t think it takes less maturity to face death than to handle a drink; but as I stated in the post:
…the military teaches discipline and responsibility. Chugging a beer does not.
To apply your reasoning, if you believe that the age at which you cannot drink must be an age at which you’re still a child, then I would assume that you believe the driving age should be raised to the drinking age, too, right?
After all, if you get behind the wheel of the car, as we see in the news almost every single day, you are taking your life and the lives of complete strangers into your own hands. Go have a look at the crash statistics for teenage drivers versus drivers in their 20s or 30s.
If someone isn’t old enough to make real-life decisions about whether to kill someone in a war scenario, and isn’t old enough to make those important decisions about how to drink responsibly, then you’d “darn well better be” a proponent of raising the minimum driving age to 21, right along with the drinking age, and the age of military service.
Driving a car takes a lot of maturity. Drinking takes, in my opinion, at least that much if not more, and it can impair one’s judgment severely.
It seems to me that the military teaches a level of discipline and responsibility that helps people make many real-life decisions that have nothing to do with war. If everything doesn’t happen at once, I’d think everyone would be in favor of our children or young adults — whatever label we choose for them — having at least the opportunity to be exposed to that kind of disciplinary learning before they are “turned loose” in a bar or liquor store.
Patrick,
Thanks for your response. I wrote out a 4 paragraph response to your response but when I tried to submit it I got blocked. The message said it was because I included the words adult or mature in my post! That is very strange. Especially since those words were part of my original post. Hmmmm.
But I’ll try again.
I would like your honest, yes or no answer to the following question. It is not a trick question such as “have you stopped beating your wife?” so I would appreciate a straight answer. Here goes. Do you really believe that a person who is 18 years old is mature enough to handle the responsibilities of fighting in battle, but that they won’t be mature enough to drink responsibly for THREE more years?
Your response to my orignial post suggests that serving in the military will somehow teach young people the discipline and responsibility to enable them to handle “being turned loose in a bar”. Hmmm. I wonder if you have any statistics to show that 21 year olds who have served in the military drink more responsibly than 21 year olds who have NOT
served in the military.
I haven’t researched it myself, but anectdotal evidence seems to show that an awful lot of former military people have significant alcohol and substance abuse issues after they leave the service. One could probably make a good argument that the stress and machismo of serving in the military actually contributes to the development of drinking problems rather than reducing them.
Only three other countries in the world have a drinking age of 21. In most countries you can drink at 18 or earlier. I find it hard
to believe that the USA, South Korea, Malaysia and the Ukraine know more about producing responsible drinkers than the other 200+ countries in the world.
Thanks for the opportunity to have this discussion.
Bill,
As for the “captcha” function, there are certain words like the ones you mentioned that are extremely commonplace among spambots, and so once in a while you’ll have to deal with that extra step. Until I find a better option, it’s the best I can do to avoid dozens of extra comments a day that wind up slowing down moderation.
So let me answer your question as honestly as I can:
Do you really believe that a person who is 18 years old is mature enough to handle the responsibilities of fighting in battle, but that they won’t be mature enough to drink responsibly for THREE more years?
In the most general of cases, no.
But there’s a problem with trying to connect the legal drinking age to the age at which someone can fight in a war: in our society, it just doesn’t work that way.
That’s because right now — at least at this point — fighting in a war is voluntary. Until we have mandatory military service again, someone who is 18 cannot legally drink and is not required to face the responsibility of fighting in a war.
If a draft were to be instituted, and if I had any say in the matter, I would specify that one would have to be 21 before they could be sent into combat. I think 18 is too young for that.
But it doesn’t work that way, either.
We have tiered measures of what is “reasonable” at different ages. It’s not at all unreasonable to ask, as you have, what happens in those three years between 18 and 21. But then that same argument can easily go the other way.
Some states, for example, say that parents can legally leave their kids home alone when the children reach age 11. (It varies state to state, but that’s about the youngest age I’ve seen among states that actually specify an actual age.)
What happens in the four years between that age and 15, the age some of those same states say that child is suddenly eligible to begin driving?
And what happens over the next three years that makes that same child now suddenly responsible enough to vote?
And what happens over the next three years to boost maturity enough that drinking alcohol is considered safe?
When I was a senior in high school, I was editor-in-chief of the newspaper there, and one of my editorials dealt with a school bus accident. Many parents were furious because the bus driver was younger than 18, an age they apparently considered important. We did some digging and discovered that the bus driver was, as I recall, just a few weeks away from his 18th birthday. I asked way back then what magical thing was supposed to have happened in the remaining weeks leading up to that birthday that would make him responsible enough to drive a bus, and if anyone could guarantee the rest of us that if the same kid waited until he turned 18, that the accident wouldn’t have happened.
The point of my post was that we can’t always say that someone can do one thing just because they can do something else. To apply that same logic, we’d be advocating that the 11-year-old who’s responsible to stay by himself at home, protect himself (and siblings) from strangers, prowlers, fire and accidents, ought to be mature enough to drive.
Do we really want 11-year-olds driving?
Or do we need to revise the law to say no parent should ever be allowed to leave a child under 15 home alone?
Maybe, adding freedoms gradually over several years of a child or young adult’s life makes for an easier adjustment than allowing the child to wake up one day as a full-fledged adult who can suddenly do EVERYTHING.
Childhood is tough enough as it is, I think, without that kind of pressure.
Drinking, it just so happens, falls at the end of the list. I personally believe that 21 is reasonable, but I know many disagree. I’m a lot more likely to reconsider based on evidence that lowering the drinking age is somehow healthier. Comparing other activities that are legal at different ages, to me, seems like comparing those pesky apples and oranges.
Not that anyone asked me to contribute, but I’ll throw my penny in.
I grew up in Finland, where age restrictions on “adult stuff” differ from the US standards to an extent. The legal drinking age there is the same as the legal driving age: eighteen. You can’t drive without adult supervision before your 18th birthday, not even with a learner’s permit. But there’s more.
When I got my license in 1995, it entailed several steps. First, I had to attend driving lessons once or twice a week for a period of several months. Then, I took a driving test, a written exam, and of course a physical. Also mandatory was a winter conditions driving test which was two-part: driving on asphalt doused with motor oil (summer time class) and driving on snow/ice road (winter time “clinical” practice session).
I paid around $2,000 for my license, all totaled.
Furthermore, at the time it was still mandatory for new drivers to keep a removable plastic plaque on the rear window of any vehicle they were operating that had “80″ on it in huge numbers. What this meant was that for the first year, a new driver was not allowed to exceed the speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour, which equals 50 miles per hour in the American standard. Not even on the highway, not even when passing cars.
You may think that sounds like a police state way of doing things, but it worked quite well in my case. I kept my speed under that limit, because that plastic flap in the window told everyone behind me that I was to drive at that speed and not one iota faster. When you are a new driver, your reaction time isn’t that great, and you tend to exaggerate your own abilities as a driver, compared to someone with years of driving experience.
When I moved into the States, I was confused to see that even a 16-year-old, who could not be trusted with tobacco, much less alcohol, could be trusted with the lives of pedestrians and fellow drivers by letting them get a license and drive around, showing off to their friends how a Honda Civic turns into an F1 racer.
I felt a similar uncertainty about the drinking age being 21. In most European countries it’s 18, as it is in Finland. I thought 21 seemed about as ridiculous as the concept of a dry county.
At one point, I was going to blog about it, and use European statistics as evidence as to why the American 21-years-of-age limit doesn’t provide health incentives compared to the 18 years limit in, for example, France.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to write that blog post, because the statistics I found – which were provided by European news outlets, no less – leaned heavily towards increased alcoholism among young adults in countries with a lower drinking age limit. By alcoholism I don’t mean drinking in general; I mean binge drinking.
Finland has a mandatory draft for men the year they turn eighteen, by the way. So everything kind of happens in that same year.
Interestingly, there is one thing you can’t do in Finland as an adult until you are 25 years of age: adopt.
In the US, you can adopt a child at 18 years of age, although adoption agencies probably aren’t wild about applicants that young.
Think about it. You can drive at 18, you can buy a shotgun at 18, you can adopt a child and thereby be responsible for the life and well-being of an infant at 18… But you can’t be trusted with a bottle of Johnny Walker.
This isn’t to say that I necessarily agree with the idea of lowering the drinking age in the United States. But I do, however, feel that if you’re going to keep it at 21, the other age restrictions may need some rethinking, just so that when put in comparison, they will make at least a lick of sense.
Patrick,
Thanks for your response to my post. In it I speculated that military service probably correlates to increased drinking problems, but had not researched it. Well today I googled “drinking problems military” and one of the first links
confirmed my suspicion.
<<>>
I’m sure that young people learn many things in the military, responsible drinking habits does not appear to be one of them.
Your response comparing 11 year olds being left alone to 15 year old drivers is once again comparing apples to oranges and misses my point about a tiered sequence of responsibilities. Staying home alone is obviously not as important as driving a 2000 pound vehicle at 50 mph, so obviously less maturity is required. You ask what happens between 11 and 15? A lot happens. Just pick up any book on child development and it will describe the emotional and intellectual progress that occurs between 11 and 15. Every child is different some 13 year olds are more mature than some 16 year olds, but minimum age laws attempt to set reasonable standards based on the capabilities of different age groups.
Both of your responses imply that my position of not believing that the drinking age should be higher than the military service somehow leads to a slippery slope of picking a universal age at which ALL of the privilidges of growing up must occur. That simply doesn’t follow. I am simply saying that it makes no sense that the incredible responsibility and stress that a military person faces in battle is way more significant than the responsibility of a drinker and that therefore it makes no sense that you can legally enlist before you can legally drink.
I’m not saying that drinking is not a serious responsibility, because it is. But there is no way that it is a heavier responsibilty than fighting in a war.
By the way, I like your idea of 21 as minimum age for military service.
But since military service is voluntary, it’s not something that every child is going to face, whereas almost all will face situations in which they’re left alone, a point at which they learn to drive, and a point at which they want to be able to drink.
I would still argue that drinking is the most dangerous of those three, even moreso than driving, because sometimes drinking can impair the judgment to the point that even a good driver can turn deadly.
So of those three items, I think it’s perfectly reasonable that drinking would be among the LAST of freedoms granted to young people.
But more to the point: The Center of Science in the Public Interest reports that since the legal drinking age was set to a mandatory 21 year age in 1986, thousands of lives have been saved. Indeed, more than 1,700 lives were saved the first year after the change alone.
So I fail to see what we accomplish in lowering the drinking age. If data suggests that more young people die with an earlier opportunity to drink, what advantage is there in allowing that to happen?