National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984

The only time you actually get into trouble is if you get caught supplying alcohol to minors. I was drinking when I was 8 years old and never got caught. The few times some friends were caught they just got a ticket for underage drinking and had to pay a couple hundred dollar fine. If you got caught a couple of times then you might have to go to court and do some community service but I don't recall that ever actually happening to anyone. They just got more tickets and paid them off. The punishemnt from the parents was a hell of lot more scary than any tickets.

I would say 19 is a reasonable compromise as there are lots of 18 year old HS students but not nearly as many 19 yo HS students.

 

We have a saying in Norwegian...Dust, du er sinnsyk. In the English, it translates to Schmuck, you are insane.

 

But it's not. Not really. It's something that almost every kid in America does, that almost every parent in America expects, that most parents actually approve of (not so much at the time, maybe, but in an abstract sense).

If a parent wants to restrict their kid from drinking or punish them for it, then fine. But the government? Not their place.

 

The government was drafting 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam and many objected to the fact that they could be forced to fight but were not allowed to vote so the voting age was lowered to 18. Some states also lowered the drinking age to 18 around the same time on the premise that these kids should be able to drink a beer legally before going off to die for their country.

That did not work out very well so many states raised the drinking age back to 21. By 1984 there was a rampant campaign against drunk driving going on and there was a lot of complaints about youngsters driving long distances across state lines to get drunk in the few recalcitrant states that had not raised the drinking age. It was red meat for the tough on crime righteous right so they got right on it and made 21 the national drinking age.

 

I agree. The government stigmatizes drinking under 21 as sinful, etc. But as long as most Americans don't really care, the law wont solve any of the alleged problems.

 

Well, I turned 18 just before the drinking age was lowered to 18 and turned 21 shortly before it was raised back to 21. As a witness I can confidently state that raising the drinking age back to 21 solved a lot of problems. In fact the experiment was such a horror show and so traumatic that they also outlawed happy hour and pitchers of beer. The people finally calmed down enough to allow happy hour again, but it took them 30 years.

 

I'm a conservative, and if there was one thing I could change about the GOP it would be that tough on crime BS. It's all a bunch of BS and a waste of money. If someone is given the responsibility of an adult, they deserve all the privileges of an adult. If they are not given the privileges, they can not be treated as an adult. And putting someone away for life is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. Someone is so vile that they need to be removed from society forever, but instead of spending fifty cents on a bullet we're going to spend fifty thousand a year for the rest of their life to keep alive someone we will never let back in our society.

 

FACT: When we lowered the drinking age, traffic fatalities from drunk drivers under the age of 21 exploded.

FACT: When we raised the drinking age back up, traffic fatalities from drunk drivers under the age of 21 declined markedly to their pre-act levels.

Correlation and Causation established. The majority of those under 21 cannot be expected to drink responsibly in America.

 

Kids can't even drink legally throughout most of their college experience. But believe it, they drink.

I think alcohol intoxication is the most dangerous of all drugs. Really, have you or anyone you've ever known completely blacked out of conscious existence while still operating in an awake state. Me and most others I know have. I'm 4-leaf-clover lucky I didn't cause some serious grief.

I dunno, man. Set the chronic smoking age to 16.

 

It's honestly irrelevant to me. It sounds to as though you would support suppression of second amendment rights if it was somehow shown to improve life expectancy and public order. While I believe the opposite to be true, gun statistics should be irrelevant when we're talking about a fundamental, common sense right.

I mean just think about it. Yeah, the average number of deaths from underage drinking went up in the 1970s (when the age was lowered) by 11% (some explosion). I might note that this is a raw stat, coinciding with the maturing of the the first baby boomers, and with 10% of a generation being called up to die it's likely there was a lot of drinking linked to greatly increased stress levels.

But, like I said, right and wrong isn't a statistic. You might as well tell me that stripping me of my 2nd amendment right will make me safer, but while that may satisfy you, it isn't enough for me to give up on liberty. I'm with Benjaming Franklin - those would would sacrifice fundamental liberty for a little security deserve neither liberty nor security.

 

Ah, the federal drinking age bill blackmailing the states under threat of losing highway funds...a legacy of Mr. "States' Rights" Ronnie Raygun.

Abolish the draft registration and abolish the drinking age. Both have no place in a civilized society.

 

You're pretty well-established as not caring about peoples' lives, though.

The way I figure it, if we villainize and disallow drinking, all that's going to do is make kids incapable of drinking responsibly. Do these deaths occur when the kids come from cultures where childhood drinking is considered normal -- like most of the world?

 

Yes and no.

In Australia we have very strict driving laws for young people in their first three years of driving. One is zero alcohol level in the blood, and another strict speed limits even on major highways.

Under 25 year olds represent about 12%-15% of the driving population but represent over 35% of the driving fatalities.

Where the problem lies is, the coming of age of adults. Marked by being able to drink at 18 years of age and being able to get a drivng license at 17.

 

Lol, so we should take away rights based on subjective statistics? Cool, let's look at every crime from a race/age/gender perspective, and start banning things accordingly. For instance, blacks should not be able to own firearms because they lead in murder rates, whites shouldn't be allowed to go to parks, babysit childen, and the like, because they're the most likely to be child molesters, let's ban women from office because they're more emotionally driven, and let's ban people over 40 from voting, because they supported Mitt Romney over Ron Paul.

You and statists of your kind are so easy to dissect. What an idiotic, anti freedom, point of view.

 

The right is more concerned with punishment and retribution and against rehabilitation, which is a big problem since these people they lock up with their draconian sentencing will eventually come back into society and live among us. It is not the heinous lunatic criminals that are the problem so much as the three time shoplifter given a life sentence. It is at a point now where many of the states with three strikes laws and draconian sentencing are stuck between funding schools and roads or prisons. It is a sad situation brought on by right wing hysterical appeals to base emotions. We can only hope that people will become less and less inured to this type of politicking and begin using their brains to vote. It will be the end of the republicans of course since it is their only method of gaining votes.

 

I have to agree with you. This always drove me a little bit batty as well.


But what REALLY REALLY REALLY gets my goat are under age teenagers who break the law and then get tried as an adult.

Look, i know it sucks, and creates other problems, But either you ARE an adult, or you are NOT an adult. There is NO such thing as an "in between adult". So when a child cmootis a crime at age 15, and gets life in prison with parole, I think thats pretty crappy.

Personally. I think you need to make the legal age of adulthood even sooner than 18. Maybe even as low as 15 or something.

There are no good answers to all these issues sadly. So I think the only real way to deal with it is to create a clear and cut age.

Your an adult or you are not. Period.