If the country's urban infrastructure weren't so car-dependent, drinking and driving wouldn't be such an issue. Youthful binge drinkers would have a way to get home that didn't involve endangering everyone else on the road, and there wouldn't be such a push for getting your driver's license at the earliest possible age.

Mark Kleiman, who says that although a drinking age of 21 really does reduce the level of youthful drunk driving

... by resorting to a slippery-slope argument.

Another fucking moron.
.

I think the day America can adopt a sensible policy towards any drug will never come. As usual, if you make enough money you can let your kids learn about alcohol and sex at home, and if you don't make enough money, that's called "child abuse"- you must rule your children with an iron hand so they will leave home and experiment with strangers.

Frankly, it's all so fuckin' stupid you just want to die. When I was 20 we'd score a bottle of cheap wine or corn likker and get drunk. Big deal. 50,000 of my cohort died in Vietnam and 50,000 vets died after returning from alcoholism and homelessness. Compared with a war, drinking underage is a pretty safe thing to do.

jimBOB is right.

When I went through my binge-drinking period I was fortunate to live in an urban area with fairly good public transportation. That's probably why I'm still alive.

But not everyone is so fortunate. Until we get somehow to being less car-dependent, strict enforcement of drunk-driving rules is a must. Age is less an issue. A drunken 50-year old behind the wheel is just as dangerous as a drunken 18-year old, but has less excuse because he or she ought to know better.

But what do all the former youthful binge drinkers

The 21 drinking age encourages binge drinking for younger adults because they tend to binge before they go out on the town. The culture of binging off-campus before a college sporting event (Beer and Circus) doesn't help either.

Former? Who said anything about former?

Jk, jk. Anyway, that move to 18 sounds like a good idea to me, as does ZT. Taxes sound smart too, but I don't envy the politician who confronts Joe six-pack on that issue.

Anywho, I've always been persuaded by the national service idea - if someone is old enough to join the military and fight and die for this country, they ought to be regarded as responsible or at least adult enough to drink.

Was discussing this yesterday with a friend. We came down to the conclusions that there should be no legal age to drink; Throw it back at the parents to control. But, no one under 18 could buy it.

The ZT law actually sounds quite good too.

jason

Oh my God, leave it where it is. As a former 18-year-old and now a mother of an 18-year-old, I think you're only asking for trouble by giving kids carte blanche to booze it up. I don't see the positives in this at all.

I love this issue! I was one of the last people in the U.S. to turn old enough to drink twice -- being 19 and living in Louisiana in 1995. You would think that this confers upon me some kind of unique insight, but you'd be wrong.

For what it's worth, I don't put much stock in the "disregard for the law" argument. People disregard the laws they disagree with all the time, but this doesn't turn underage drinkers, jaywalkers, pot smokers, and the like into lawless heathens.

As for zero tolerance laws, I don't get the point. Is the problem that young people are drinking some (but not enough to be over the legal limit) and then getting into accidents? (Keeping in mind that young people, as a group, are pretty bad drivers even when completely sober.)

George Will wrote a column about this where he endorsed lowering the drinking age but adding a drinking license. I think it's at least as good, if not better, than the NT and high tax ideas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/18/AR2007041802279.html

... although a drinking age of 21 really does reduce the level of youthful drunk driving, it also encourages disrespect for the law and encourages young adults to acquire and use false ID.

But seeing as many kids are already drinking before the age of 18, I'm not sure what this concern about "disrespect for the law" means. That we should lower the age of 13 or 14, so as not to create a criminal class in our country's high schools?

Color me persuaded by things like quantifiable reductions in the number of drunk driving incidents among the target demographic, but this business about "encouraging disrespect for the law" sounds kind of, well, stupid. Is the suggestion that it's supposed to create generations of scofflaws? Evidence, please.

I think the argument is full of shit. One does not need to be all that mature (intellectually) to wield a gun in combat. It is a FACT that humans do NOT mature emotionally or intellectually until into their low to mid-twenties. In particular, those portions of the brain involved in making judgement calls is just not there until you hit about 23-25. Now, go ahead and get 18-year-olds liquered up and pile onto the TOTAL lack of judgement?

Be that as it may, I want PROOF that binge drinking that these college presidents are worked up about is actually restricted to those who are underage drinkers and not, as I suspect, a GLOBAL practice of immature drinkers, legal age or not, in college. PROVE to me that it is only those who aren't "legal" who are binging and we'll then decide if this experiment should be tried.

Oh...take away their keys they go to college.

I haven't looked at the proposal in detail, but in general, "Zero Tolerance" means "Zero Brains". Stupid policies where administrators', cops' and judges' hands are tied and they're required to enforce stupid draconian rules.

One good idea would be to require some sort of uniformity between states. I went to college for a while in northeast PA. At the time, the PA age was 21 and the NY age was 18. Since the nearest town in NY was 20 miles away, over twisty mountain roads, this led to a lot of needless carnage.

Oh my God, leave it where it is. As a former 18-year-old and now a mother of an 18-year-old, I think you're only asking for trouble by giving kids carte blanche to booze it up. I don't see the positives in this at all.

But they aren't kids; they are adults. That's always been what is ridiculous about the move to 21.

In virtually every country in the world except the US, the legal drinking age is either 16 or 18, at least for beer and wine. It is 19 in Canada. How do the DUI rates of other countries compare to those of the USA?

Here in the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin), our college students aren't making headlines for drinking and driving so much as they're making headlines for drinking and DYING. They pass out on the way home in January, and freeze to death to a sidewalk. Or they fall into a river (we do have a lot of waterways up here). Or whatever.

Lowering the drinking age to 18 or 19 would help, I think, but only if this country's attitude about drinking changes as well.

Are you people familiar with the "Power Hour"? Here in Minnesota, it means when you turn 21, then at midnight, you go to a bar and you drink 21 shots in an hour. Kids have died from this. It's very common.

But then, what do you expect? Parents STILL aren't talking to their kids about sex, drugs, drinking (or rock 'n' roll), so kids are still left to their own devices.

I thought my parents' generation (early baby boomers) was supposed to be the generation that changed things, that talked to their kids. I was wrong. And now it seems that MY generation (I'm 40) is not doing any better.

Legalize pot.

Well, I'm not exactly a former youthful binge drinker.

18-year-olds (and in other places, younger) are preferred soldiers because they can be trained to obey orders without question. Some of them, anyway. And they can't be used domestically, protecting us from any undesired consequences.

Now, I challenge you to transfer that argument to alcohol.

That said, the current law isn't working. I welcome a time when a clean breathalyzer test is required to start a car, but might that not lead to the era of the "designated car starter"? And reducing the drinking age to 18 transfers the "designated booze buyer" problem into high school. Any votes for 19?

If anyone knows of a good solution I'd like to hear it. I don't.

I would rather have my 19 year old daughter drinking at a bar surrounded by bouncers and bartenders than a frat house basement or in a cornfield. Putting liability on the bar owners (with strict enforcement) makes them fairly zealous enforcers of public safety.

This is not a question where we need to rely on our instincts. There's actually data, collected in Phil Cook's Paying the Tab. The 21-year drinking age reduces drunk driving deaths compared to the 18-year drinking age. It does so both among 18-to-21s and among 16-18s. A 0% BAC limit for drivers under 21 also reduces drunk driving deaths. Higher alcohol taxes reduce all of the costs of alcohol abuse; a dime a drink would reduce the damage from alcohol by 5-10%.

Personal note to GrandMoffTexan: And the horse you rode in on.

Well, I'm not a former binge drinker, but I am a former high school teacher and I gotta say that lowering the drinking age to 18 poses some serious problems for public high school staff. Many h.s. seniors are 18. Great effort is expended to monitor students both at school and at school events outside the academic day. What happens if students become legal drinkers at 18, are compelled to attend school and may choose to attend school-sponsored events? Do you think that hosting social and extra-curricular events where some of the participants can drink and some can't is a practical solution? If you think so, you have never had the privilege of supervising such events and accepting the legal liability for the safety of participants. Think it over.
C.

I've always wondered why 18 is considered old enough to serve and die for one's country. That should definitely be raised to 21.

Age of Majority = Age of Majority. The fact that we have arbitrary differing age limits for "privileges" is goofy.

I missed the binge era (it didn't exist before they raised the drinking age), but was an intern in a state legislature, when all the shiny promises were made about raising the drinking age.

The 21 year-old law has been a public policy disaster - but it sure sounded good and tough. How come college kids don't drink responsibly? Because it's illegal. This crazy, scizoid culture, zero tolerance on the one hand, ensures binge drinking on the other hand. Raising the drinking age destroyed the sensible middle ground.

Those who say raising the drinking age lowered DWI's are taking a page right out of "How to Lie with Statistics": The drunken driving rate had already started to fall prior to these laws - and every age group has lowered its drunken driving rates.

It is telling how we refuse to look at the stories of other countries. Are our American kids genetically inferior to European and other Western Democracy kids, where the drinking age in overwelmingly lower - in most cases 16? There are only a handful of countries with drinking ages as high as ours - yet look at our problems.

When I was a legislative intern, the senators and representatives who had a justifiably concerned belief on all of the promises made by this special interest group, would joke, "Mabye we should raise the drinking age to 55 and lower the speed limit to 18."

Tilli (Mojave Desert) for President!

Who ate all the damn nachoes?

Oh my God, leave it where it is.

Right on. We went through this once upon a time when I lived in Massachusetts. That law was overturned so fast that most people don't even remember it. What you end up with is a bar full of the "coolest" high school students, a few of which may be 18 (or have fake ID) who will go up to the bar to order for all their underage friends. Every drink order is a game of 20 questions and constant demands for ID, not to mention the parking lot shows put on by drunken teeny-boppers.

Ugh!

If you raise taxes on alcohol, kids will stop buying beer and start buying cheap, high proof grain alcohol, where the chance of death is much greater. Bad, bad idea.

a drinking age of 21 really does reduce the level of youthful drunk driving

which, it turns out, is offset by an increase in drunk driving by people aged 21 and a litle above (according to researcher Mike Males. IIRC, Males looked at single-vehicle night-time auto accident fatalities as a proxy for drunk driving rates). So, no net decrease in drunk driving deaths.

And there's the moral argument as well. Laws should apply equally to all adults. Period.

In my day, you could drive at 16 and drink at 18. Bad idea. Most of us are pretty bad drivers for the first few years behind the wheel, and then you add booze on top of that. Predictable result: highway carnage. So now they raise the drinking age. Doesn't solve the problem; you're still putting booze into bad drivers.
I say lower the drinking age to 12. Then you get four years to learn to handle your liquor BEFORE getting behind the wheel.

Reducing drunken driving is a good public policy, but making it a criminal justice issue is not. Seizing drunk drivers' automobiles is a good way to keep them off the road, while giving them tickets and even jail time, while leaving them their cars, is not.

Since we now recognize people are adults when they turn 18, they should be allowed to drink legally. How to help them do it reasonably, both for their safety and the safety of society, is a difficult issue. ZT is not a very good solution because it criminalizes the issue. If it was known drinking and driving would cost the perpetrators their autos, dui's would become rare.

I did not like the lowering of the drinking age because it encourages bar hopping and discourages having parties. Bars cost a lot of money and are not great places for conversation. Clubs are good for dancing, which is one reason for their popularity, but I alwyas preferred parties for meeting people.

At that age they're not going out for a few social cocktails, they're going out to get f'd up. Period. Been there done that. Bought the T Shirt.

I think instead of a drinking "age" we could set a goal: You can start drinking after you graduate from high school, whether you're seventeen or nineteen -- if you drop out, then drinking age would be 21:

. No one would be allowed to drink in high school.
. Prom night would be the big deal, but since we are already super vigilant with it anyway, it wouldn't be such a bigger deal to curb excessive drinking during a couple of weeks. Perhaps it would make Spring Break be less about drinking as well.
. It would make dropping out of high school a bigger hassle -- who would like to wait until 21 when all your friends can drink already?

It's not perfect, but what law is? If it doesn't decrease the number of drunk drivers, it will do for drop-outs ;)

How old do you have to be to rent a car? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Slippery slope indeed!

First of all, zero tolerance laws are absolute horseshit. "ZT" always means the government or organization can't handle individual judgments.

Kids are "pressured" to drink and raise hell, and the more forbidden the behavior, the more desperate they are to do it. So, drop the drinking age to 18. In reality, even the best parents cannot completely control their kids' behavior, short of quitting their jobs and becoming limpets. When kids reach teenagehood, it's their friends you can't control, and their friends are all wise and smart and cool, while parents are idiot dullards.

It's almost impossible because of our dependence on cars, but it would solve a lot of problems if we actually raised the driving age to 21. Getting a drivers license in Europe and in other parts of the world is an expensive, time-consuming process. However, the technology of ignition interlocks already exist, and could be made available inexpensively as a requirement for a certain length of time -- for all new drivers.

If nothing else, lowering the drinking age would reduce the number of kids flushed into the vortex of the criminal justice system -- and oxymoron much of the time. Unfortunately, I have seen this firsthand.

When I was growing up, and kids got in trouble, they were often turned over to their parents. Now, an underage kid who fails a breath test at a roadblock (even if the kid isn't physically drunk) will be handcuffed, dragged to jail, and nailed with all manner of fines and fees by a system that, if you really look at it, is parasitic. If you think the system (process of community service, probation, counseling, etc.) has any interest in the kid's rehabilitation, you're wrong. It's all about money and humiliation, and it really is a vortex. The expense inevitably falls on the parents, not the kid. The slightest violation (not paying a fee in EXACT amount cash) can send the kid to jail and deeper into the vortex.

If it sounds like I believe in coddling criminals, I don't. I'm saying that underage legal issues are being addressed poorly, if at all. In addition, many of these situations are made worse by ZT constraints on judges.

As for the "old enough to fight, old enough to drink," there's a simple solution. Raise the "fighting age" to 21. We'd have fewer troops, but fewer wars, maybe.

Don't lower the drinking age, raise the age at which one can join the military.

Since I don't like the taste of alcohol and therefore hardly drink at all

But which alcohol taste specifically? There's no one alcohol "flavor." Guinness tastes nothing like Riesling which tastes nothing like Captain Morgan's. Then there's mixed drinks...

The difference between alcohol consumption and things like marriage, voting, and enlisting is you get married, vote, or sign up for the military and the only person you're really affecting is yourself. If you're talking about lowering the drinking age, every drunk between the ages of 18 and 21 would be putting themselves and everyone else on the road in harm's way.

prohibition doesn't work. And since 18 year olds are adults, why basically create a two-tiered system? those smart enough/driven enough/rich enough to go to college away from home almost always have immediate easy access to booze. College (I matriculated in 93 to a small college with a drinking reputation) is where I learned to drink and learned where my limits were (and yes, that involved a night or two freshman year of praying to the porcelain gods) my first year alcohol was easily available on campus, heck, the local liquor store would deliver, and freshman drank beer with the occaisional mixed drink or shot. you could drink a beer in the lounge watching football, or go to a party and drink. even if security came by, they were permitted to make a snap judgement about whether to walk you home or let you be. 6 people went to the health center for alcohol-related sickness.

sophomore year, under pressure from parents and the police, the school cracked down. no more deliveries, no more open consumption for u-21s. citations for having alcohol in your possession (if say maintenance entered your dorm room, etc) so what happened? instead of drinking beer, freshman started to drink liquor. instead of drinking at a party, people got drunk BEFORE the party, and got drunk fast. more parties moved off campus, leading to more driving. alcohol-related admissions to the health center rose to 31. the school taught people that drinking wasn't a social activity, but something to do as a means to the ends of getting drunk as fast as possible. Is that really the better response?

If McCain wins the election, we will all need to start drinking heavily.

I live in a College town. I think the fines on underaged drinkers more than pay for the extra law enforcement. Similarly, there's money in the Residence Halls for various activities that is totally funded by students who are fined for drinking offenses in the halls. And, I imagine that binge drinkers are more profitable for the bars in town than would be rational drinkers -- starting with those 21 shots instead of 18 if the law was lowered...
If the drunken drivers only killed themselves, I'd say, let them. But they don't. On the other hand, lots of drunken drivers are way over 21...

Get rid of the age limits altogether.

"What happens if students become legal drinkers at 18, are compelled to attend school and may choose to attend school-sponsored events? Do you think that hosting social and extra-curricular events where some of the participants can drink and some can't is a practical solution?"

Ummm ... you ban alcohol (and any level of drunkenness) at the school function? Seems a doable thing: certain areas of town around here as well as event organizers ban alcohol and drunkenness no matter what the age of the offender.

Problem with ZT laws: when is the alcohol in your system "gone"? Is that in any way knowable? Not really, I suspect. Alcohol isn't some magical substance which stays in your body for some prescribed amount of time then disappears: it's still there (and detectable) for LONG after you've lost all its obvious effects. The reason for 0.08% as a limit is because MOST people with that high of an alcohol content are still feeling its effects. So, while you may not know when you are "over" the limit, you do know with a reasonable degree of surety that you are "under" the limit, and erring on the side of caution there is a matter of sitting it out for a little while before driving, or asking someone else to drive you.

No, ZT laws ONLY work when in conjunction with an overall ban. If you are not allowed to drink, then ZT laws enforce that (without the officer actually having to see you drinking). Without a corresponding ban, ZT laws just confuse the matter and make more people make more "judgement calls" when they are less likely able to make a good judgement call.

As a former 18-year-old and now a mother of an 18-year-old, I think you're only asking for trouble by giving kids carte blanche to booze it up.

As a former 18-year-old, did being 18 ever really stop you from drinking when you wanted to? When I was under 21, there was never one instance where I wanted to get alcohol but couldn't. We always found a way.

As the father of two teenagers, my vote would be to lower the drinking age to 18 and raise the driving age to 21. It's a lot easier to enforce the driving age: the police see someone in a car who appears too young, bang, they pull them over, ID them, end of story (although the ACLU will undoubtedly start crying about "age-profiling"). But the police can't go around checking into every dorm room and every fraternity house and every private home looking for underage drinkers.

That's part one. Part two is to ask Kevin whether you've ever drunk any really great wine? You're from California, they make pretty good wine out there, some of it's pretty spectacular. And you still don't like it? That's unfortunate. Wine, women and song, you know.

Why not set the age of alcohol majority to the age at which individuals (state by state) can be charged as adults in criminal proceedings? If you can be judged to be responsible as an adult for your criminal offenses (and potentially put to death) what's a bit of dutch courage?

Schlitz Malt Liquor

Prohibit an activity with a Zero Tolerance policy and what do you get? More people interested in that activity in part because of the "naughtiness" of it.

Did Prohibition make a significant dent in the demand for alcohol?

Has prohibition of cannabis led to a discernible decrease in its use?

How about teenage sex? With all this abstinence-only garbage, the teen pregnancy rate has been rising for the last handful of years after declining the 15 years prior to that.

Outlawing things makes them sexy. Legalize all victimless "crimes." An adult or group of consenting adults (18 or over) should be able to engage in whatever activity they like so long as they are not harming other people (driving while drunk is obviously harming other people, or at least putting others in harm's way)

old enough to die in Iraq, old enough to drink

Look what 20 years of hard drinking did to the cretin in the White House...

One minor but obvious advantage to lowering the drinking age would be that teachers of freshman composition would be freed from the need to read hackneyed student essays about the need to lower the drinking age.

If you combined this law with the legalization of pot, I'm convinced the overall quality and creativity of writing by 19-year-old college students would skyrocket.

This is one I think should be TOTALLY left up to the states.

Along with speed limits, and how much alcohol in the blood is too much alcohol.

Another is double-striping. I live in a rural area where because of federal law, all the roads were double-striped about 10 years ago. The locals knew where to pass, and a lot of good passing places disappeared. When you get behind 25 bicyclists on your way to work, you are faced with the choice either to cross the double yellow to pass them or be waaay late to work.

Thanks for the opportunity to vent.

My opinion is that these three things should all be the same age: drinking, military service, and driving.

More teenagers are killed in car wrecks -- where they were sober -- than by drinking, and by a huge margin. Yet no one really considers raising the driving age, even though a car is much more deadly than a beer.

So make them all 18, 21, or even 25. But having them in the current order (16, 18, 21) is backwards at the least, and just plain dumb at worst.

I grew up near the border between Illinois and Wisconsin when Illinois had drinking ages of first 19 and then 21, while Wisconsin had a drinking age of 18. The exodus of underage Illinois teens over the border to Wisconsin to drink was a rite of passage, and for many a chronic way of life. Fake ID's were always a problem, regardless of what the current legal drinking age was. Lots of people in Wisconsin made lots of money off of underage Illinois drinkers. I think a national drinking age of 21 is the way to go. Figure out a better ID system that can't be faked, and then exercise diligence in checking ID's. The real problem on college campuses is that students of legal drinking age are willing to purchase alcohol that ends up in the hands of underage drinkers at parties, or at least that's how it was when I was in college.

old enough to die in Iraq, old enough to drink

If your are violent enough to kill in Iraq, your are too violent to drink.

DBL: lower the drinking age to 18 and raise the driving age to 21.

I see your point, but the soccer moms aren't going to like the extra duty.

This is all bullshit. In this country, 18-year-olds can: vote, enter into binding contracts, get married (and have children) and go off to war for their elders. They can also incur the full brunt of the criminal justice system when they screw up. They are adults. Until it comes to booze. Part of being an adult is (or should be) legal access to alcohol. If 18-20 year-olds screw up with alcohol, see criminal justice system. As it is we pat ourselves on the backs for limiting access to booze, Mothers Against Drunk Driving purrs with satisfaction, and no 18-20 year-old is really inconvenienced at all because it is oh-so easy to get the booze. Unless of course he/she gets caught by a zealous cop and then enters the system.

We are a hypocritical society and we actively discriminate against our youth. Zero Tolerance? As has been pointed out, this is just (usually) school code-speak for zero brains. What in the hell do we gain with this shit?

And don't even get me started on the drug laws. Anybody ever compiled statistics on the number of criminals we've hatched needlessly over the years? Including the underage drinkers? Yeah, like some kid having a beer or smoking a joint threatens the greater society. Hey, if they harm others, that's why we have the criminal justice system. Hammer 'em. Otherwise, if they're old enough to fight our wars, I'd say they're old enough to be adults in full standing.

And for you concerned parents and school marms, I say "suck it up." If you raised 'em properly and schooled 'em properly, they might surprise you with just how responsible they can be. Ask any Army officer or NCO about just how responsible an 18-year-old can be. I've seen kids in combat that made a lot of 30 and 40-somethings seem absolutely juvenile in comparison.

"Here, son. Take a drink of this and bite on this bullet while we amputate."

You can't have absolutely Zero Tolerence (as opposed to very low tolerance) because there are so many legal products that would cause false positives. Already Mouthwash and breatspray will give you a breatalyzer of well over 0.01 if administered right after use. Detectable levels persist for much longer and would give many false positives if the zero tolerence threshold were lower. (and you can't give every 20 year old you pull over a urine test).

I remember entering college in 1973, VA still required "3.2 [%] beer" for anyone 18-20, to get accustomed to milder alcohol first. Heh, maybe it would work again. I actually enjoyed the mild effect and wish I could (or where can) get beer/coolers etc. like that again - remember "LA" (low-alcohol) beer? Sometimes that just hits the spot, and it's easier than mixing your own weak drink, beer/NAB etc.

What's the effect of lowering the driving age? Because if people learned to drive at age 14, and got past that stage where they are most dangerous as drivers, perhaps we'd see some improvement. (I've read that there are a certain number of flight hours where pilots are considered to be at their most dangerous --- no longer beginners, but now cocky, while still way too inexperienced.) How do states with different ages for getting a driving license fare?

If they have ZT laws for alcohol, they should also have ZT laws for driving while yakking on your damn cellphone. I've seen a lot more dangerous driving by nimrods on cellphones than I've seen drunk drivers.

I attended college in the late seventies, drinking age was 18, very little binge drinking was going on. There was a lot of excessive drinking (including by myself). This excessive drinking occured over many hours and generally involved beer. I attended a college that ranked annually in the top twenty "party schools" as determined by Playboy magazine. This was a source of pride to the student population.

I have three children all who are attending or have attended college. After my son's first year of college I was amazed at the amount of "binge drinking" that occurred. This binge drinking ususally involved doing shots of hard alcohol over a short amount of time. This is a much more dangerous situation than what we ecountered in the seventies.

When I thought about it in context of the change in drinking age it made sense for several reasons. (1) Hard alcohol is easier to smuggle onto campus, (2) hard alcohol is easier to hide in your roorm, and (3) multiple shots of hard alcohol makes it easier to "pre-game" before an alcohol free campus event. It also becomes apparent that multiple shots of hard alcohol in a short amount of time adds to the inability of an individual to know how intoxicated they are. This leads to an increase in the amount of alcohol related deaths and hospitalization.

When the push to change the drinking age began in the eighties the rational was two-fold: (1) reduce the amount of drinking and driving and (2)reduce the amount of underage drinking by high school students. At this point, I have to mention the absudity that (1) drinking and driving was only being done by young adults 18-21(keep in mind that the generation prior made a habit of three martini lunches)and (2)adults aged 18-21 should have to suffer in order to keep 16 and 17 year olds from drinking.

In my opinion, the number one reason why alcohol related fatalities and accidents have decreased in the last 25 years is not because of the change in the drinking age but because of the increased educational message of "drinking and driving" and the enforcement of the "drinking and driving" laws that were always on the books.

This is the biggest difference in behavior (beside binge drinking) between my generation and my children's. My children know that drinking and driving is bad, that the finiancial implication is significant, and that there is zero tolerance from law enforcement officals. They always have a designator driver.

My generation in the seventies thought nothing of getting in a car when drunk and generally got "Have you been drinking tonight? Just take is easy on the way home" lecture from police officers if we were pulled over. I am ashamed of the condition I was in many times when I took the wheel and I'm grateful everyday that I didn't injure/kill myself and others. But there was no negative stigma or legal/financial consequences than.

I hate to take a page out of the gun lobbys playbook but, there are laws on the books they just need to be enforced. It is ridiculous that 18-21 year old adults should have to bear the burden of this issue.

America's policy on booze and drugs is a reflection on America's policy on anything else. It's overly punitative, it doesn't make any sense, and it's based on a puritanic drive to criminalize anything fun.

Will some kindly European (or Canadian or Aussie) please adopt me!!?!