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Saturday, August 30th, 2008Response to my Fox column on the drinking age was split pretty evenly. Below the fold, a selection of reactions.
I am 34, college educated, etc. so I grew up in the “21 means 21” world. My son is 4 years old. But regardless of my efforts, my son will break this law. I will try to delay his drinking as long as possible, but be realistic. No one wants “alcohol” parties for middle school students. (I would do not allow unsupervised parties by middle school students; period.) But at 20 years, 11 months and 25 days old, a cop still gets to send my son and me to jail if I host a birthday party the weekend before he turns 21. SILLY. I do not know the answer, but it must lie somewhere between those two extreme examples.
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There you go again. You should really give up writing. You are not good at it. You employ logical fallacy and ridiculous factoids like a roofing company employs illegal immigrants. I would reply point by point, but it would take way too long and far too much writing, since not a word in your article is accurate.
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I think it would be a big mistake to lower the drinking age – I know some kids are going to do it anyway, but if it is lowered, we will be putting even more drunk drivers behind the wheel. I don’t care what other countries do – we are ahead of them in many ways, why lower our drinking age just because they try to make alcoholics younger than we do.
The number of deaths from drunk driving is higher than the number of gun-related homicides – instead of fighting for gun control, lets fight for drinking control – makes sense to me!
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Thank you very much for sharing the information in this article. My introduction to alcohol was the gradual parent-supervised one, and I really appreciated that education as I attended the funerals of college peers who were not so fortunate. Please keep writing on the subject, and send your work to every college president you can find. This discussion should be mandatory. I will be sharing the article with my alma mater, Vanderbilt.
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When I was 14, I vacationed in the Bahamas, that had no drinking age, and beer machines next to soft drink machines. I had no urge to buy alchoholic beverages, I didn’t like the taste. At 16, it was the rebelious thing to do, so I drank, like my friends, and experienced my first hangover. That was enough to convince me not to drink excessively.
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Nicely done piece. As a parent of two college-aged children, a trustee of a university, you’ve got it just right…and your call for a reasoned debate is spot on. Thanks for writing this.
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Just an observation from long ago:
When I entered college in 1969, the drinking age was mostly 18, except for one nearby state, where it was 21. The only freshmen who drank so much that they made themselves sick were from the nearby state with the 21 year old drinking age. The rest of us could not understand their behavior.
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I don’t have any hard data, just a world-weary speculation: I’ll betcha the same tight-a**ed bluenoses who demand “not a drop until 21″ sneer at sexual abstinence programs…
Thanks for the refreshingly rational discussion; such is rare these days… My own kids? I introduced them to alcohol at home, in a non-pressured evironment. Didn’t much care what the laws were at the time, or now, for that matter. Come to think of it, I introduced them to firearms, power tools, and driving the same way. One is a BSN, one is an MD, and one is a 2nd-year med student; they all seemed to turn out OK…
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Instead of lowering the drinking age they should raise the voting age so the idiots can’t vote or drink.
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So what’s next? High School students like to partake of the forbidden fruit too and I am sure they are equally compelled to do it and even more so since it is forbidden. So let’s make it un-forbidden for them too. What a great idea. Just think, if we pass such a law, an 18 year old student that is still in high school can legally purchase alcohol. Wouldn’t that just be peachy? Think of the peer pressure to provide it for his/her buddies? What a great solution to the terrible, crippling, monumental problem of someone coming home from Iraq not being able to drink in celebration.
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What BS.
Years ago when the drinking age was 21, all of the states changed it to 18. The reasoning was that since 18 was the new age that people were pronounced to be adults, they should be allowed to drink.
Big mistake, that. The new drinking age caused many problems and soon was changed back to 21.
Now, it seems you and others want to repeat the mistake made back then and lower the age to 18 again. How long is this madness going to continue?
The best think to do is ban alcohol drinking for everyone, but, as history shows us, those sort of laws are never properly enforced.
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Phooey! The college presidents pushing for a lower drinking age merely wish to be excused from having to enforce the law. If ti is legal to drink at 18, why then they don’t have a problem.
All the latest brain research says that young people’s brains do not fully mature until around the age of 25. Lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18 is contrary to this research … this is moving in the wrong direction.
What would you have next? Why not lower the age to 12, so that high school principals won’t have to worry about the drinking age?
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You forgot to mention teens can be tried in a court of law as adults.
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Great article. As a parent of a 19 year old son who is a sophomore in college I welcome this debate. We are deceiving ourselves if we think the present drinking age has any bearing as to when kids start drinking. Any law that is as routinely broken as this one is not much of a law.
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This initiative is due to the fact that college administrations don’t want to be bothered monitoring this activity and are trying to push it back to the high school level. I used to be a bouncer in the 1970′s at high school dances removing the rowdy drunks. I wouldn’t do it today because you don’t know who might have a gun. Alcohol, kids and cars make a deadly mixer. I’ve known three people that have died from drinking (rotted their gut) and they were both well over 21 and, oh by the way, they started drinking before the age was raised. Or, we could do like Germany and lower the drinking age to 16 and raise the driving age to 21. That sounds good.
Gee, Radley…….you’ve got some glittering gems of colossal ignorance in your reading audience…….let’s see if you can get more of them to come out from under their rocks.
Keep up the good work.
This is pretty much boilerplate trollspeak.
Well, let’s just delay the time that they can be tried as adults to 25 as well!
Just think, murder someone under 25, and you can be sent to juvie!
“The best think to do is ban alcohol drinking for everyone, but, as history shows us, those sort of laws are never properly enforced.”
So its an enforcement issue? Gotcha. (wink)
Well, this was the response from Fox News readers!
There were some real debating champions there, eh? From non sequiturs and every sort of logical fallacy, right up to just plain old mis-stating the facts and mis-quoting Radley.
Well, at least half your audience seemed to grok it….
A standard response seems to be “these college Presidents just don’t want to crack down on campus drinking!” to which my response is, “Duh! Why should they want to? Haven’t they got better things to do than to monitor the behavior of *adults*?”
The best think to do is ban alcohol drinking for everyone, but, as history shows us, those sort of laws are never properly enforced.
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This person just advocated temperance and appeared to be serious. Jesus H. Christ, what are we going to go with backwards fucks like this? I know, appoint them to the MADD board!
“This person just advocated temperance and appeared to be serious”
No, they advocated prohibition. Big difference.
I know it’s somewhat pedantic, but it is an important distinction. If people want to advocate that people abstain from alcohol because they think it’s harmful or offends their deity or whatever, there’s nothing wrong with that. Stupid perhaps, but not wrong.
“Well, let’s just delay the time that they can be tried as adults to 25 as well!
Just think, murder someone under 25, and you can be sent to juvie!”
Don’t forget military service. Lets make that change and really save our kids from being killed.
Truly I believe that anyone who believes that a service member can go a die for this country but cannot drink in this country should be beaten with a hose. It infuriates me to no end.
“Phooey! The college presidents pushing for a lower drinking age merely wish to be excused from having to enforce the law”
And when precisely did college presidents and their academic administration become law enforcement officers?
Wait a minute, is it illegal for someone under 21 to drink alcohol even in private in the US? Here (UK) the age is 18, but that’s the age restriction for buying alcohol and drinking in licenced premises. It’s allowed for a parent to buy a 14 year old one drink with a meal in a licenced pub, and a parent is legally allowed to give a child alcohol at home from the age of 5 onwards (though please correct me if I’m wrong on this, we were told all this in the usual ‘Don’t Do Drugs/Alcohol!’ lessons at school and that was about 10 years ago)
Ah, but we’re so much better at law enforcement these days, what with every moderate sized city having a tactical unit. We could do it this time! Bring on the tommy guns!
It depends on the state:
Try as I might, I can’t find the part of the US Constitution that gives the federal government a mandate to have anything at all to do with regulating that which individuals of any age may ingest. For good or ill, this, as it pertains to children, is a parental responsibility.
Andy Craig:
“This person just advocated temperance and appeared to be serious”
No, they advocated prohibition. Big difference.
Valid point, Andy. My bad
“Wait a minute, is it illegal for someone under 21 to drink alcohol even in private in the US? Here (UK) the age is 18, but that’s the age restriction for buying alcohol and drinking in licenced premises.”
It varies from state to state. Here in Maryland, a minor may drink alcohol with parents permission. The parent must be present, and I believe it is only at a private residence, not at a resteraunt, but I need to double check that.
Yep it varies from state to state. In MN, a parent can serve u at home but otherwise its 21. We r also a “3.2%” state which means in any store but a liquor store, they cant sell beer that contains more than 3.2% alcohol and thats all they can sell. No wine, nothing. Its hard to get drunk on 3.2 beer. I wonder if allowing 18yr olds to buy 3.2 beer and nothing else would get some of the staunch opponents of this on board? As i said its hard as hell to get drunk off the stuff (at 17 we managed :) ) and i dont think u could possibly poison yourself on it, tho im sure somewhere at least one person would find a way to do it.
Can’t believe all this hoopla and self righteousness. My dad allowed me to drink beer with him as a youngster. It held no fasination or inticement. When I was in my late teens I couldn’t believe how the other kids went crazy guzzling everything they could get a hold of. I could have a beer whenever I wanted, big deal. Yes, I got carried away a few times in my life, but it had nothing to do with starting too young, just the opposite.
Same thing with smoking. I was proud of the fact I could have smoked, but didn’t want to.
My favorite line was this:
Instead of lowering the drinking age they should raise the voting age so the idiots can’t vote or drink.
As if age somehow cures idiocy!
Col. Hogan:
To be fair, these are _State_ laws. There is no federal mandate, though there is a fair amount of pressure (Radley’s article calls it blackmail: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,410283,00.html).
So what you should be concerned about is the sovereignty of our States and citizens being under attack from the federal government. It’s sad when it’s the rebuff to the attack that gets news, and not the attack itself.
The Federal Government didn’t set the drinking age at 21. What they did do was to threaten to withhold Federal Highway funds from States that didn’t change their drinking age to 21.
Let’s face it. State Governments sold out their people for the almighty Federal dollar. There was no Constitutional violation. Congress controls the Federal Budget and gets to say who gets what. Your State either toes the line or loses funding.
A State is free to change it’s drinking age to what ever it wants, if it is willing to lose it’s share of Federal Highway Funds. I don’t see that happening any time soon.