Posted on 09/09/2008 2:29:35 PM PDT by neverdem
I agree actually (and I live in a dry county). I attribute my lack of abuse of alcohol to the fact that I was allowed to consume moderate amounts of it under parental supervision prior to turning 21.
Personally, looking back I wasn't mature enough to handle it. Drank like a fish and thank God, I didn't kill myself or someone else. Lot's of nights I have NO IDEA how I got home. My friends found me lying in the middle of the street dead drunk more than a couple of times
I also think 21 is far to old to be of legal drinking age, especially when you can defend your country.
How about a compromise of 19 years old???
I looked up that very issue on the internet and could not find a single state where is is legal to give your child a drink in your home. I know that is what everyone thinks/does but apparently it is not true.
We need to set a single age all these issues. A child becomes a legal adult at 18 so why can’t they have a drink.
drive, drink, vote, contracts, military service, etc all the same age: 16, 17, 18, 19 pick one and make it the same for everything
I think there’s a lot of stuff you’re never really mature enough for until you do it. Drinking, be in charge of your domicile, raising a kid. All these things tend to be really good at throwing a curve ball at you so no matter how mature you were before hand there’s a nasty life lesson to be learned.
Exactly. If one is an adult, one should be expected to act with a level of maturity and responsibility that goes along with that age.
I say keep the law as is, at 21 years; unless you have a active duty military ID card.
I know that’s the one that’s always thrown out, but most 18 year olds are not out there doing fighting for our country, so I’m not particularly willing to make law based on a small subset. And frankly, I think that they CAN drink on base (if not, they should be able to if it makes you happy). I know they also used that one to give 18 year olds the right to vote, something I think was not a wise move (I know I’ll get flack for that, but I’m tough).
susie
“Once again two subsets of the Democratic Party will have divergent opinions on an issue.”
Same true for Republicans.
click the text for the actual statute
I think this kind of stuff leads to over all delayed maturation. You know how they say 40 is the new 20 or whatever the numbers are to talk about how the current generation is pushing back adulthood. I think this plays into that. I know when I hit 18 I didn’t feel adult, and not being able to legally drink played into that. Sure I had to register for the draft, but come on, I couldn’t drink, how much of an adult are you if you can’t buy beer.
People don’t tend to feel grown up until they can assume adult responsibility. We keep pushing them away from that with things like drinking ages.
In WW II I could drink but I couldn't vote.
I would lower it to 17, the lowest age that you can join the Armed Forces, IIRC. The graduation ceremony when I completed Army Basic Training was on my 18th birthday in 1969. In the last few weeks before the end of training we were given privileges to drink beer at the local PX concession after training in the evening. When I went to "jump school" in 1981 at Fort Benning, GA, a machine selling cans of beer, like a soda machine, was in one of the barracks.
"It makes little sense. And when a large number of college presidents ask, 'How many times must we re-learn the lessons of Prohibition?' the answer is: We never learned the lesson the first time."
While I certainly can’t support the reasoning behind giving an 8 year old alcohol (brain is still developing) and I even have some reservations about young people even in their late teens and early 20’s (again, brain is still developing), the arguments to lower the age are valid.
All I can say is that when I was 18, in the state of Ohio, one could buy 3.2 beer and we bought a lot of it. My high school even advertised a high school “beer bash” at the local Y. Talk about incongruency. Nevertheless, I don’t think my peers suffered from alcoholism, truancy, or any other ill effects any more than those who later could not buy any beer until age 21.
In some ways, I do think the “forbidden fruit” comes into play here. And it does seem somewhat hypocritical to tell a young man he can have his legs blown off in service of his country but can’t go have a Bud with a few of his buddies.
I’m not a drinker. I will imbibe on special occasions and I think wine is actually good for a person. It just makes me sleepy though.
I think a good part of the problem is the American media/cultural love affair not with drinking but with drinking to excess. I never went to a party of high school or college kids who were drinking a few drinks to unwind, or because they liked the taste. The goal was to get wasted. And that's the real issue.
Btw, a stat from the CDC:
Young men ages 18 to 20 (under the legal drinking age) reported driving while impaired more frequently than any other age group (Shults et al. 2002, Quinlan et al. 2005).
susie
Here is another link: http://www.youthrights.org/dastatelist.php
The link does have some state laws missing but its a start.
But they CAN. Not only can they volunteer to defend your very life they can be FORCED to by a draft. Yet they can’t get a beer.
At 18 a person is old enough to join the military, enter contracts, get married, rent a home, buy a home, create life through legal fornication and yet we won’t let them buy a beer. That’s stupid. It should all be unified. If we don’t think 18 year olds are old enough to drink, which truthfully is one of the safest things on that list, then they are clearly not old enough for the rest of it.
One age for adulthood, pick it and stick to it. The phased system we have now just engenders lack of respect for the law and sets up frank idiocies.
Also silly. Regardless of the phasing phased adulthood is dumb.
This study appears to refute that as an urban myth.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/ace-fis082106.php
“Perhaps we should do away with age limits for anything. If 18 is old enough, why not 16? If 16 is old enough, why not 14? Etc...”
When I lived in Germany the drinking age was 16, but not really enforced. You had to be 18 to get a drivers license though. They look at drinking differently there though. Parents do teach their children how to drink. Young people drink at adult functions, under adult supervision. Being a drunken ass is really frowned upon. I always thought it was kind of neat to see so much interaction between teens and adults. Teens here don’t seem to want anything to do with adults. Perhaps it’s because they’d rather sneak off and drink. Here though of course if adults drink with teens they get arrested.
Thing is, age alone is not an indicator of competence. There certainly are 14yos who are entirely capable of driving safely, and there are 30somethings who should not be allowed to touch car keys. Likewise there are teens who are mentally ready to drink, and plenty of “adults” who give alcohol a bad name.
What our society needs is a “coming of age” criteria, some way of evaluating and acknowledging that someone has achieved adult competence - regardless of age. Simply declaring someone an adult at 16/18/21 is entirely inadequate, as is criticizing the choice of one age over another.
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