Lowering the Drinking Age?

RUgreek · #1 06-21-2002, 02:24 PM

Well,

I know what everyone's views are concerning alcohol and their chapters, but the idea of lowering the drinking age isn't as far-fetched as one would imagine.

http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcoholinfo/...Interview.html

This sort of debate is interesting, each country seems to have different arguments for the pros and cons.

So, what's your position ???

- RUgreek

sigmagrrl · #2 06-21-2002, 02:41 PM

Sorry, I think teenagers are so overfed, overindulged, and spoiled as it is, they wouldn't be able to handle alcohol. I am NOT for lowering the age at all! I am actually for stiffer fines. I vote for taking away licenses until they are 21 if caught drunk three times. Sorry, I guess coming from a family where alcoholism was rampant and painful, I am anti alcohol consumption. Yes, I drink, but I don't get drunk, I am 27, and I didn't even drink the night I turned 21....Alcohol isn't my thing...Guess I am for people finding happiness and bliss in themselves and not in a bottle or a chemical reaction!

AOX81 · #3 06-21-2002, 03:00 PM

I think the drinking age should be lowered to 19. I would say 18 but most 18 year olds are still in high school. I'm 26 now but I never drank until I was 21 so it never really made a difference to me.

If you are old enough to vote and to die for your country you shouldn't have to wait until you're 21 to have an alcoholic beverage legally.

33girl · #4 06-21-2002, 03:23 PM

I pretty much agree with everything Dr. Engs says in the article.

I think we shouldn't have a drinking age, period. If kids could learn from little up to appreciate alcohol and not misuse it, it would cut down on overconsumption. The way it is nowadays, alcohol's so hard to get that kids go crazy when they do.

aephi alum · #5 06-21-2002, 03:25 PM

I agree with the idea of lowering the drinking age.

It's wrong that we can put a gun in an 18-year-old's hand and tell him to go out and fight and die for our country and then tell him he can't go have a drink.

Young people have to learn how to handle alcohol. The best way to do that is at home with your family or out with friends, not locked in your room with a bottle of vodka that some 21+ friend bought for you.

Perhaps the best solution is to modify the law so that 18-20 year olds can't buy alcohol at package stores or supermarkets, but they can order a drink at a bar or restaurant, where there is a responsible bartender and other people around to make sure the young person doesn't overdo it. A few years ago in England, a law was proposed that would allow 16 and 17 year olds to have a beer or a glass of wine with dinner (drinking age is 18 there) - maybe something like that is a good approach.

AOX81 · #6 06-21-2002, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 33girl
If kids could learn from little up to appreciate alcohol and not misuse it, it would cut down on overconsumption. The way it is nowadays, alcohol's so hard to get that kids go crazy when they do.

Exactly!

TaraHopeful · #7 06-21-2002, 03:34 PM

I'm only 17 and yes, i drink, but I am also responsible about it. That doesn't mean that i think that the drinking age should be lowered to 16 or anything but i think 18 is the perfect age. At this age, one is supposed to be considered an adult. When you're 18, you can vote, smoke, fight in war, get hotel rooms, buy a car, etc etc etc. If you have all of this responsibility already and you are old enough to be able to handle it, why can't you drink? It's insane in my eyes. And yes, there are going to be exceptions that go off and get slammed all the time. They're alcoholics and it's not like there aren't alcoholics that are of legal age. Right? Well that's just my underage two cents.

Dionysus · #8 06-21-2002, 03:35 PM

Well, eventhough I am anti-alcohol, I think the drinking age should be lowered to 18 because:

1. You can go to war, h*ll if you can die for your country, you should have the right to appreciate a cold beer if you want to.

2. You are considered as an adult, nuff said.

3. H*ll, people under 21 drink anyways, why not make it legal?

Corbin Dallas · #9 06-21-2002, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by aephi alum
I agree with the idea of lowering the drinking age.

It's wrong that we can put a gun in an 18-year-old's hand and tell him to go out and fight and die for our country and then tell him he can't go have a drink.

Young people have to learn how to handle alcohol. The best way to do that is at home with your family or out with friends, not locked in your room with a bottle of vodka that some 21+ friend bought for you.

Perhaps the best solution is to modify the law so that 18-20 year olds can't buy alcohol at package stores or supermarkets, but they can order a drink at a bar or restaurant, where there is a responsible bartender and other people around to make sure the young person doesn't overdo it. A few years ago in England, a law was proposed that would allow 16 and 17 year olds to have a beer or a glass of wine with dinner (drinking age is 18 there) - maybe something like that is a good approach.

one of my buddies said in wisconsin, you can drink at a restaurant if your parents are with you and obviously they consent. i think you have to be 18 for this.

33girl · #10 06-21-2002, 03:48 PM

I apologize if I've posted this before, but it's one of the best if not THE best articles I've ever read about the futility of the 21 drinking age for college students in particular.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Battle Of the Binge

Why do college students drink so stupidly? Because drinking intelligently is against the law.By JACK HITT

Back in the 70's — my college time — an English professor I barely knew named Ted Stirling spotted me on the quad and invited me to a small, informal reading after supper. Maybe he felt sorry for me. I had marooned myself in the French ghetto of la litterature comparative, and had further exiled myself in the cul-de-sac between Latin and Spanish. So I went that night to sit on stuffed sofas beneath scowling bishops in gilt frames and to discuss Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Afterward, Stirling bought the students a pitcher of beer at the pub, and we strained to act intelligently and comfortably while drinking with an elder. ("Stevens an insurance agent! Surely you jest, Professor. Why, that would make poets the unacknowledged underwriters of the world, wouldn't you agree?")

I started thinking about how I learned to drink at college — I went to Sewanee, in Tennessee — when I read about a recent Harvard study that found that 43 percent, nearly half, of all college students today "binge drink," defined as regularly pounding down four or five stiff ones in a row in order to get blasted. The pandemic is so severe that 113 college presidents united a few weeks ago to publicly admit that a generation is in peril. They have also rolled out a public-service ad, which employs that brand of sarcasm Madison Avenue thinks young people find amusing. "Binge Beer," it says. "Who says falling off a balcony is such a bad thing?" See, you're supposed to realize that falling off a balcony is, in fact, a bad thing.

Other educational tactics include dry rock concerts, abstinent fraternities, "mock 'tail" parties, a Web site of course (www.nasulgc.org/bingedrink) and a new CD-ROM called "Alcohol 101" and featuring a "virtual party" that segues into an anatomical lecture about how quickly the bloodstream absorbs alcohol. Look out, Myst.

What no one seems to have noticed is that the rise in binging has occurred at the very same time that the legal drinking age has been raised everywhere to 21. If you're 18 to 21, it's the 1920's again and a mini-Prohibition is in full swing. As a result, moderate drinking has almost vanished among students and, more tellingly, from school-sponsored events. How anachronistic it feels to describe what used to be routine college functions, like a Dizzy Gillespie concert or a Robert Penn Warren reading, followed by a reception, with drinks and hors d'oeuvres, at which students were expected to at least pretend to be cool about it, i.e. practice drinking. I frequently received dinner invitations from faculty members like Tom Spaccarelli, a Spanish professor who served up tapas while uncorking a Rioja for a few students. We handled the long stems of our wineglasses as confidently as a colt its legs.

And there was always another occasion. Sewanee had dozens of those inane college societies like Green Ribbon, a group whose invitation to membership I haughtily trashed after Professor Paschall, my sponsor, explained that the point was nothing more than "getting dressed up and having cocktails with some alumni."

But I began to see the point about 10 years after graduation when I returned to Sewanee to give a little talk. Afterward, I took some students to the pub where they sheepishly ordered cider. At first, I thought this new college life — clean and sober — was a good idea. Then my nephew, a junior there at that time, explained the typical partygoer's schedule: drive off campus or hide in the woods (often alone), guzzle a pint of bourbon, eat a box of breath mints and then stumble into the dry sorority party serenely blotto. My nephew knew two students who had died — falling off a cliff, blood poisoning — and five others who had been paralyzed or seriously injured in car accidents because of binging. For a college with roughly 1,300 students, this constitutes a statistical massacre.

We drank wildly in the 70's, too. The Phi's had their seasonal Screaming Bull blowout. Kegs were easy to find on weekends. I have drunk tequila only once in my life, and this being a family newspaper, my account of that evening can proceed no further. I was a member of the Sewanee Temperance League, whose annual outdoor party pledged to "rid the world of alcohol by consuming it all ourselves." But all those events were crowded social occasions, almost always with professors and their spouses in attendance — not prowling alone in the woods with a pint. After college, when you got a job, Screaming Bull opportunities quickly tapered off; the working world was different yet, in time, quite familiar, like an evening with Ted Stirling or a dinner at Tom Spaccarelli's.

This year, Ohio University's zero-tolerance program has proudly outlawed empty beer cans in the dorm. Nearly 7 percent of the entire 16,000-student enrollment last year was disciplined for alcohol abuse, often handed over as criminals to the Athens Municipal Court. Despite all the tough bluster, the binge rate among students there hasn't budged from an astounding 60 percent.

For college students, booze has been subsumed into the Manichaean battle of our drug war. It's either Prohibition or cave into the hippies' legalization schemes. And it seems fairly unreversible. Legislatures raised the drinking minimum in reaction to the raw emotion deployed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Then colleges were bullied by insurance companies that threatened to jack up liability rates if administrators didn't take aggressive action. The old days of looking the other way, when the police used to pick up toasted students and quietly drive them to their dorms, seems like collaboration in today's harsh light.

There probably is a way out of this, but it is going to require some larger cultural changes that will make us see the irony, even cruelty, of infantilizing certain young adults. The very people who have urged this situation into existence are too often the people who vent about the increasing lack of "responsibility" in our society (demanding, for example, that juvenile offenders be treated in court as adults). But for middle-class kids in college, they make responsibility an ever-receding ideal, never quite grasped in the pampered ease of an extended adolescence.

In the early 70's, the big political fight among college students was for the right to vote. The argument held that kids who were considered old enough to die for their country and order a drink in a bar should be able to choose their political leaders. It is back to two out of three again. But booze is not like the vote, which can be ignored to no one's immediate peril. Rather, alcohol consumption, like table manners or sexual behavior, is a socialized phenomenon, which if not taught, yields up a kind of wild child. By denying the obvious pleasure of drinking and not teaching it by example, is anyone really surprised that we've loosed upon the world a generation of feral drunks?

Jack Hitt, a frequent contributor to the magazine, last wrote about campaign finance reform.

October 24, 1999

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

SATX*APhi · #11 06-21-2002, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Corbin Dallas

one of my buddies said in wisconsin, you can drink at a restaurant if your parents are with you and obviously they consent. i think you have to be 18 for this.

I believe that is the way it is here in Texas; I'm not positive though.

I am 20 and I tried testing this out by ordering a glass of wine with my meal when I went to dinner with my parents at an Italian restaurant a few weeks ago. The waitress did not even ask for my ID, so either A) she figured I would not try to order a drink if I were underage and with my parents or B) she could tell I was underage, saw that my parents didn't mind, and chose to serve me.

I do think she may have asked for my ID had I been ordering a martini or some other drink from the bar.

sigmagrrl · #12 06-21-2002, 03:56 PM

1) Would they actually enjoy A, ONE single beer? No, it's the drinking to excess that they want, the excuse for drunken behavior and rowdiness.

2) Are you telling me that these teenagers want to drink because they ACTUALLY APPRECIATE THE TASTE AND BOUQUET of a fine merlot? Or the craft of brewing a fine micro? No, of course not! It's the feeling of invincibility, the being free to say and do what they normally feel too nervous to say and do, the sexual freedom and openness they feel, the not worrying about the consequences of their actions, the inflated self assurance.

3) And I wish people would stop with the whole "You can die for your country" crap. Since the 60's, not one person has been drafted. Military service is completely voluntary. And frankly, I don't want my military slamming back a few. Aren't you supposed to be the Few, the Proud?? An Army of One? Strong and Of Sound Mind???

Please, it's all crap. Alcohol is a mind altering drug that you just want access to for the influence and change to your demaenor, not for the health benefits. If donuts and bagels gave you the same effect, alcohol wouldn't have the same draw. Don't bull$hit a bull#hiter!

33girl · #13 06-21-2002, 04:56 PM

sigmagrrl,

I'm sorry that alcohol has been a problem within your family, but please don't use that experience to assume things about others. Not everyone who touches alcohol becomes completely irresponsible. Yes, some people will become alcoholics if they start drinking at 18...they would also become alcoholics if they started drinking at 21, or 35, or 59.

And the last I checked, men MUST register with Selective Service at age 18 or they are denied school loans, among other things. i don't consider that "completely voluntary."

LeslieAGD · #14 06-21-2002, 05:12 PM

While I know that people have a point about the serving your country and not being able to be served a drink, I still don't think believe that the drinking age should be reduced. Think about how most people act on their 21st birthdays...they don't say "cool, I'm 21, I think I'll have a drink", they think "alright, I'm gonna go to the bar with my friends and drink shots until I can't walk!" I feel about alcohol, how I feel about cigarettes and cursing: if it wasn't such a big deal, kids/young adults wouldn't care about. Now, that may sound contradictory, but it's not like we can say, "okay, starting tomorrow, it won't matter anymore and we're not going to make an issue of it" because it does and we will.

Part of me wants to agree with aephi alum about being able to drink with your family, because I know I did. I grew up being able to have a glass of pina colado, etc., at family functions and now, as an adult, I don't really care much about alcohol and I've never been drunk in my life. However, not everyone has responsible family members. What if your parent is an alcoholic? While having wine at a restaurant with your family doesn't sound bad, I still don't believe alcohol should be able to be purchased under the age of 21.

I also think Sigmagrrl has an excellent idea about taking licenses away from young adults until they are 21 if caught drunk three times.

chicagoagd · #15 06-21-2002, 05:32 PM

Would you allow your child to drive a car without first teaching her how to drive? The drinking age needs to be lowered in order for parents to take responsibility for teaching their kids how to drink.

1. The thrill of driving fast = how many can I drink before I feel good. Teach your child how to stay within the speed limit, know their personal limits, and how much is too much

2. Think of understanding the "subtleties of alcohol" as knowing the difference between an automatic and a stick shift. Kids just want to experience the alcohol (the thrill of the drive), so they just learn the automatic. Do parents teach kids the subtleties of wine/beer/hard liquor like they teach their kids how to drive a stick shift? NO. They need to have time to learn the difference between a fine merlot vs table wine, import vs domestic, Smirnoff vs Stoli - now they buy whatever they can get and therefore drink it as if it's their last glass of water (hit the gas and hope you don't hurt yourself).

3. Would you feel comfortable having her friends teach your kid how to drive a car? I don't understand why this to allowed to happen with something as mind altering as alcohol. Parents can't closely monitor after their child goes to college/moves out.

4. Why aren't there alcohol education courses required before being allowed to drink like there's driving education courses? They can be a prerequisite to college entrance/driver's license renewal/lowering of insurance rates.

It's irresponible behavior to think that someone who hasn't been educated to act like they have that knowledge. If you expect people to act responsibly, then we as a nation need to educate them and not expect them to know how to stay within the limits, how to shift gears, and how to drive without giving them a controlled setting so that they can learn while being monitored.

Signing off,
Amy