I have never supported a ‘big-drinking’ culture. Alcohol is best consumed moderately, enjoyed leisurely, with agreeable company.
Wisconsin has seen more than her share of drinking tragedies, made far worse by stubborn insistence that, if only enforcement becomes severe enough, we’ll be able to stop further tragedies.
We won’t. No level of enforcement tried or seriously proposed has stopped, or would stop, further misfortune. Our present way generates grand headlines but no permanent gains.
There’s another problem: we insist that one cannot drink until twenty-one, but can fight and die for America at eighteen. It’s a shameful contradiction between the contention that hundreds of millions are too immature to drink, but over a million of that number are mature enough to risk their lives in defense of this republic.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, of Instapundit, makes the case for a lower drinking age:
Along with joining the military, 18-year-olds can vote, marry, sign contracts….but forbidding them to drink on campus because they’re deemed insufficiently mature to appreciate the risks….
To be fair, over 130 college presidents, as part of something called the Amethyst Initiative, have called for an end to the drinking age of 21. They note that the higher drinking age doesn’t stop college students from drinking, as anyone who’s been on a college campus in the past several decades knows. It does drive drinking out of bars and restaurants and into dorm rooms and fraternity houses, where there is less supervision from the non-intoxicated and less encouragement for moderation….
Defenders of the status quo claim that highway deaths have fallen since the drinking age was raised to 21 from 18, but those claims obscure the fact that this decline merely continued a trend that was already present before the drinking age changed – and one that involved every age group, not merely those 18-21. Research by economist Jeffrey A. Miron and lawyer Elina Tetelbaum indicates that a drinking age of 21 doesn’t save lives but does promote binge drinking and contempt for the law.
See, Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Drink – WSJ.com.