To my post last week about Indiana's universal carding law for alcohol buyers, commenter littlejohn attached this comment:
Or, we could just get rid of the minimum drinking ago altogether. Seriously, when you were a teenager, did the law prevent you from getting a six-pack if you wanted one? Is a drunk 18-year-old any worse than a drunk 21-year-old, or, for that matter, a drunk 50-year-old?
Now, I'm starting to see similar sentiments elsewhere. B. Daniel Blatt argues that the drinking age makes it difficult for colleges to develop a sensible policy:
Rather than discouraging the irrational consumption of alcohol, the drinking age actually promotes it. It turns the types of beverages human beings have been drinking in ritual celebrations as well as social gatherings for as long as we have recorded our history into a kind of forbidden fruit.
And Glenn Reynolds reminds us that drinking is about the only thing denied to 18-year-olds:
'If you get shot at, you can have a shot." That's the rationale behind Alaska State Representative—and Vietnam veteran—Bob Lynn's effort to establish a drinking age of 18 for active-duty service members.
[. . .]
The "old enough to fight, old enough to drink" argument has force. In fact, 18-year-olds in America are old enough to do pretty much everything except drink. Along with joining the military, 18-year-olds can vote, marry, sign contracts, and even take on a crippling lifetime burden of student loan debt in pursuit of an education that may never land them a job. Yet we face the absurd phenomenon of colleges encouraging students to go into six-figure debt—which can't be discharged in bankruptcy—but forbidding them to drink on campus because they're deemed insufficiently mature to appreciate the risks.
It's hard to argue with an exemption for active-duty service members. There's no good moral or legal argument for denying alcohol to people we're asking to risk their lives for the country. And it makes sense to give colleges the ability to set coherent drinking policies (more than 130 college presidents have called for an end to the drinking age of 21).
Not sure about the "forbidden fruit" argument, though. Many young people consider anything denied them forbidden fruit and therefore on the top of their to-do list. It's a kid's job to test limits. But it's the adult's job to set them -- just giving in to everything adolescents "are going to do anyway" is an abdication of responsibility. I think the arguments for lowering the drinking age to 18 are more compelling than the ones for doing away with the whole concept of a drinking age. Alcohol impairs judgment, which young people don't have in great supply in the first place. The fact that some kids are going to find a way around the law is not a good reason to make getting alcohol even easier by removing the law.
