Minimum drinking age?

[Harvey]

If so, then do you think it should be reduced to 16-18, stay the same, or raised a few years?

i don't favor any drinking age, but if I were governor of my state, then I'd forfeit Federal highway funding by reducing the drinking age to 16-18.

I personally think that all the money saved from going after and locking up underage drinkers would be enough to replace the federal funds for highways.

In addition to public safety, it's a matter of public health. There are sound scientific reasons for banning teen drinking.

The Grim Neurology of Teenage Drinking

By KATY BUTLER
Published: July 4, 2006

Teenagers have been drinking alcohol for centuries. In pre-Revolutionary America, young apprentices were handed buckets of ale. In the 1890's, at the age of 15, the writer Jack London regularly drank grown sailors under the table.

For almost as long, concerned adults have tried to limit teenage alcohol consumption. In the 1830's, temperance societies administered lifelong abstinence pledges to schoolchildren. Today, public health experts regularly warn that teenage drinkers run greatly increased risks of involvement in car accidents, fights and messy scenes in Cancún.

But what was once a social and moral debate may soon become a neurobiological one.

The costs of early heavy drinking, experts say, appear to extend far beyond the time that drinking takes away from doing homework, dating, acquiring social skills, and the related tasks of growing up.

Mounting research suggests that alcohol causes more damage to the developing brains of teenagers than was previously thought, injuring them significantly more than it does adult brains. The findings, though preliminary, have demolished the assumption that people can drink heavily for years before causing themselves significant neurological injury. And the research even suggests that early heavy drinking may undermine the precise neurological capacities needed to protect oneself from alcoholism.

The new findings may help explain why people who begin drinking at an early age face enormous risks of becoming alcoholics. According to the results of a national survey of 43,093 adults, published yesterday in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 47 percent of those who begin drinking alcohol before the age of 14 become alcohol dependent at some time in their lives, compared with 9 percent of those who wait at least until age 21. The correlation holds even when genetic risks for alcoholism are taken into account.

The most alarming evidence of physical damage comes from federally financed laboratory experiments on the brains of adolescent rats subjected to binge doses of alcohol. These studies found significant cellular damage to the forebrain and the hippocampus.

And although it is unclear how directly these findings can be applied to humans, there is some evidence to suggest that young alcoholics may suffer analogous deficits.

Studies conducted over the last eight years by federally financed researchers in San Diego, for example, found that alcoholic teenagers performed poorly on tests of verbal and nonverbal memory, attention focusing and exercising spatial skills like those required to read a map or assemble a precut bookcase.

"There is no doubt about it now: there are long-term cognitive consequences to excessive drinking of alcohol in adolescence," said Aaron White, an assistant research professor in the psychiatry department at Duke University and the co-author of a recent study of extreme drinking on college campuses.

"We definitely didn't know 5 or 10 years ago that alcohol affected the teen brain differently," said Dr. White, who has also been involved in research at Duke on alcohol in adolescent rats. "Now there's a sense of urgency. It's the same place we were in when everyone realized what a bad thing it was for pregnant women to drink alcohol."

One of two brain areas known to be affected is the hippocampus, a structure crucial for learning and memory. In 1995, Dr. White and other researchers placed delicate sensors inside living brain slices from the hippocampi of adolescent rats and discovered that alcohol drastically suppressed the activity of specific chemical receptors in the region.
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It's a much longer article that should be read by anyone considering the issue, along with other available information.

 

[alkemyst]

Drinking ages like blue laws are last gasp puritanical attempts to litigate morality...



who the frack cares if someone wants to buy beer on sunday as well..

I grew up in places where if a kid wanted a taste of wine at the dinner table he could thus never establishing the taboo complex..

It's still legal in one's own home. Although slippery slope of DCS were to stop by and witness a child fall-down drunk.

 

[MotF Bane]

It's a much longer article that should be read by anyone considering the issue, along with other available information.

Jack London seems to have done just fine.

 

[alkemyst]

I don't have a huge problem with lowering the drinking age(down to 18 but not lower) but if it's done, I think the drunk driving laws need to be toughened to the point of mandatory jail time of years (yes, multiple) if you drink and drive. If you kill someone, automatic life, no exceptions. And yes, I mean that.

To Gillbot...yes, that's an excellent idea. Can I ride on your coattails and let you lock the door on the way out?

You really need a crash course on how small a problem DUI is compared to everything else and how ineffective the laws are usually arresting those that would have never harmed anyone.

About 1/3 of all accidents are alcohol related...however that doesn't mean alcohol played a direct part. Also most of these are driver and their own vehicle only being harmed.

Out of the rest you will always have those with no regard for the law.

It's a great money generator at about $5k a pop for first time offenses.

The laws are so laughable that most insurance companies have stopped surcharging for 1st DUI esp with no property damage. Even the founder of MADD has gone on the record saying the current laws and enforcement were not what she wanted.

It's an incredible brainwash though. Almost everyone can claim they personally knew someone involved in a DUI fatality, yet murders in the US are about the same and most can't say they personally knew someone murdered. Add in the other violent crimes and you get multiples, yet most will say they can't name anyone.

What happens is some poor schmoe gets clipped by a drunk and makes the paper or news and now everyone in a 50 mile radius 'knew him'.

Gangs should be the focus, it's our biggest growing problem in the US yet there isn't much revenue in it and police budgets are shrinking. No one wants to pay for incarceration.

DUI Laws are win-win. People think they are saving lifes and the wheels that spin behind the scenes are well compensated. They feel since they are homebodies, those that get out and mingle should also be penalized...it's not uncommon to hear "well what was so and so doing out so late anyway" or "oh nightclubs, I gave those up in my teens/20's". It's how a lot of our laws come to play today. Let me take this away from you, not because it's good for all of us, but because I want to.

The sad part is in most areas if there were 1000 DUI deaths the number of arrests would be almost 200 times that. 200,000 arrests and only 1000 dying. In other areas, it's not enforced as much as long as no one was hurt. As a whole it's about 100 to 1.

The key stats are in 2008, DUI contributed to only 32% of all traffic deaths. Doing the math, chances are only 32% of these had alcohol as the real true cause or about 3800. In total though, that's 11,773 deaths and 6,316 were the driver and out of all these the was most common BAL was found to be 0.16. Also out of these 75% involved no use of a seat belt. Underage teens accounted for 17% of these deaths as the drivers.

Now there was 1,171,935 arrests for DUI made during this year. That's an insane amount of revenue for someone potentially being a danger. Add in to a ton of arrests are made with the vehicle not even in motion. Many get arrested sleeping it off, going back to their car at a party for a light or something inside, some just being close to their car with their keys. It's a big gray area.

I don't agree one should get drunk and then drive, however; at .08 that's far too low a figure.

The scary part and this is the stuff that's hard to find, is that many people driving from 10pm to 4am in a downtown area would fail a breath test yet they usually never kill anyone.

The statistics get skewed since just having alcohol present creates the statistic.

Also as far as penality unlike other tickets, most that get arrested for DUI never get another even when the reset period is up. The penalities are severe and enough for many to financially never recover.

IMHO they need to raise the limit of BAL or lower the first time penalty.

Again I am not for one going out and driving drunk, but the amount of effort to control this problem is majorly biased from other more dangerous problems.

 

[Zebo]

How about none? When we used to go to Europe as kids it was kinda like if you could reach counter with your money you got a beer. USA is kinda puritan/talibanish tho.

 

[Zebo]

Letting a 16 year old drink legally is idiotic.

My kids have wine/champagne all time and they are all under 16. Sorry some of us are not as hung up on age. I'd rather teach drink responsibly before getting to college keggers and learning the hard way.

 

[sandorski]

Alcohol is like Tits, if both were more available/common, there'd be less Teens getting a Boner seeing Tits or trying to kill themselves with Alcohol Poisoning.

 

[ShawnD1]

Alcohol is like Tits, if both were more available/common, there'd be less Teens getting a Boner seeing Tits or trying to kill themselves with Alcohol Poisoning.

This one sure is an interesting part of human behavior. People honestly have games where they drink until they pass out. Can you imagine someone doing that with coffee? Drink coffee until you're really shaky and need to take a dump?

Legal age should be 0 and leave it up to the parents. While caffeine is legal, most parents really do step in and not allow kids to drink coffee. Most parents have at least some degree of common sense. It's not much, but it's there.