Post 54- “-PLENTY of fake IDs.”
Now the college kids have fake IDs in addition to just the HS kids. Let’s criminalize everybody. Who’s next?
Whoever wants to drink (especially in college) is going to drink.
My personal opinion is similar to northwesty.
As to higher age curbing traffic deaths.—
I’ll bet that the lesser drunk driving fatalities statistics are across the age board and not only for 18-21 y/o.
Not just because of harsher penalties but that we have solutions to avoid drunk driving.
People are more likely to call cabs or Uber or have a designated driver today.
Why? Because it’s pretty easy and is now “being socially responsible”.
Nobody said you can’t drink (that isn’t stopping). They said you can’t drive while drunk. And then we’ve increasingly made it easier to NOT drive.
So how to make “shots” so less cool?
As to the lower drinking age in many countries. Very true. But it’s also true that what is readily available is limited to beer and wine most of the time.
The US drinking age has been federal policy since 1984, dictated to the states by the State Highway trust funds. There is no serious discussion/proposals at the federal level to change it, particularly since it appears to be effective, so any discussion here is pie-in-the-sky and only serves to get the discussion off topic.
I defer to the more experienced, and if raising the drinking age is saving lives on the highway, then I am certainly in favor of that.
I observe that alcohol-related fatalities among students at my university, not due to car crashes, were very close to zero when the drinking age was lower, and they are definitely not zero now. This could have multiple causes, unrelated to the legal drinking age, though.
States make their own laws about drinking age. Just because the federal government wants to hold a financial hammer over states heads doesn’t mean they can’t choose to change the law.
^^definitely true, but irrelevant, at least to the purposes of this thread, as Stanford is sited in California, and the state has had a 21 year old limit for purchase AND consumption since 1933. Not likely to change any time soon, at least thru the Legislature.
OTOH, there is/was a State ballot prop collecting signatures to lower the age to 18. Financial impact if it passes: loss of $200 million in highway funds. But it did not qualify for the November ballot.
Regardless, while a state or two may go it alone (New Hampshire: Live Free or Die), national polls show 74% of folks against lowering the age of consumption.