Outvoted discrimination victims should remember that if they drink too much, it does not hurt the despotic state senators one bit. For less than the cost of one beer, they can express their hostility toward the enemies of liberty by telling them they won’t join the National Guard to serve their country and their community because Congress and the State legislature hate everybody under 21. They should also say the nly reason the State gets away with it is because good cop-killers are hard to find these days.

The idiots are so far gone, they expect gratitude for their malicious wrongdoing.

A few concepts/expressions which could be useful in your future coverage…
“Moral entrepreneurs” (Howie Becker’s concept)
“Forbidden Fruit” (or cookie jar, but forbidden fruit works better for keyword searches, I think)
“Responsible Drinking” (a taboo expression in alcohol research in the United States but the concept which runs at the core of Amethyst)

Sell a drink to a drunk and you will be in court with him/her accounting for what happened next?

Make the license to sell alcohol contingent on no incidents been tracked back to your shop?

And the taxation rate of the manufacturers directly linked to the number of alcohol related incidents nationwide! Bring all the bills back to them.

Something like that anyway. Police the consequences when they happen and come back to the economic motive.

The town I live in is the home of Amazing Grace (hymn and movie). I was interested to see that to abolish slavery, it was necessary first to weaken the economic power of the slavers.

I don’t want to ban alcohol completely. But limiting the excess would probably follow the same principles.

@Xianhang Zhang, Brits are notorious drunks. I’ve heard people from continental Europe remark that it is necessary to be drunk to eat the food! A celebrity chef has just been lamenting the alcohol-without-food culture that you mention. If taxes were linked to consequences, would alcohol purveyors be encouraged to market via a deep understanding of beer, wine etc – say a cultural rather than a consumption approach to selling?

I wonder how much this opposition to a high drinking age is rooted in class values. The middle class reaction to a lower drinking age might be a glass of wine for dinner and an appreciation and healthy respect for alcohol but for the lower class, it might be just a reason to get drunker, faster, sooner.

I wonder how much this opposition to a high drinking age is rooted in class values. The middle class reaction to a lower drinking age might be a glass of wine for dinner and an appreciation and healthy respect for alcohol but for the lower class, it might be just a reason to get drunker, faster, sooner.

This is an interesting subject.

In general I agree with your approach, and was prepared to suggest something similar, until I saw you were on the same track.

There are some differences between your proposal and my variation. First, as a quibble, I prefer the term “license” to permit, because of it’s reaonance with the already existing “driver’s license” which I consider a parallel case.

I guess the biggest difference is that you (although you don’t say explicitly) seem to envision the system of regulation as applying only to youth. I would make it age-neutral – at least at the upper end (more on the low end later). Mind you, my proposal comes from a genuine sympathy with the ideals of the prohibition movement – although I agree with those critics who say that it is both impractical to enforce and unfair to the responsible drinker. I envision a system of licensing as intermediate between universal prohibition and universal adult drinking.

Under my proposal, there would be alcohol education similar to driver education and a license would issue upon successful completion of a written exam and a live drinking test. It would be interesting to include a requirement that one be able to estimate one’s own blood alcohol within a specified degree of accuracy. Not necessarily great accuracy – but to the extent that if you were in the bottom 10% of the population in your ability to estimate how much you had had, you shouldn’t have any.

Once you have the license, it should be reasonably easy to have it suspended or revoked. Furnishing alcohol to an unlicensed person would be a no-brainer, as would the more serious alcohol related offenses or repeat instances of the lerss serious ones. (E.g. DUI, public intox, etc).

In addition, I would make drunkeness a legally aggrevating factor in other crines, similar to what many states already do now with firearms. Commiting a crime under the influence would not only make you eligible for penalty enhancement for the crime, but would result in the loss of your alcohol license for an appropriate period.

As to whether there is enough of an alcohol problem among adults to justify what some undoubtedly would see as draconian measures, I will only say that anyone who is familiar with the culture of dysfunctional alcoholic families knows the kind of things that motivate this proposal. Those who lack this familiarity probably would not believe me if I tried to tell you.

I personally think there is probably something to the belief in hereditary factors in alcoholism. However, I do not favor an attempt to make either family history or genetic testing a factor in licensing – even if the genetics are ever definitively nailed down. I’m old school enough to deny any legitimate social interest in evaluating an individual’s genes.

Now as to the question of driving offenses. Here I think *you* are being not only draconain but impractically so. How much, pray tell, is an “iota”? Is it more or less than a “smidgin”? And how do either of these measures compare with a “trace”? Assuming you mean “a dectable trace”, I still think this is bad policy for two reasons. One, there is a serious problem with false positives at the low end. Things like mouthwash, etc. Second, research, afik, has failed to confirm actual impairment resulting from doses at or very slightly above the iota level. Operating dangerous equipment “impaired” should only be of interest to the law if there is a preponderance of evidence of actual or probable impairment. I don’t think such evidence exists at or near the iota level.

Now as to the lower age, if any. You would start at 16. I’m torn between a much younger age, and one older than the present. Here’s why.

My first impulse is to follow the example of pilot’s licenses and amateur radio operators “if you’re big enough (smart enough, etc.) you’re old enough.” But as a counterpoint to that there’s the question of actual physiological and developmental damage to a physically immature organsim – especially the developing brain.

I’m reminded of the popular accounts of research which purports to show that the portion of the brain responsible for strong emotion is well developed by the teenage years, while the region responsible for restrained judgement is not typically fullly developed until the early twenties.

My concern is that alcohol use during the preteen, teen and early ternties could impact that development. As to actual data I am personally aware of one data point (i.e. this is anecdotal) and the data is confused by other factors – but it is suggestive. (If I have only one observation, can I say “the data *is*…”?

A close friend of mine came to teenagehood in a time and place where those youth who were not prevented by their parents would gather on a patch of city owned land and “party hardy” – i.e. abuse every drug you could imagine and some you might wish you couldn’t – along with mass quantities of alcohol. She claims this was tacitly tolerated by the authorities, because that way they at least knew where the kids were and could keep an eye on them – and had they tried for a crackdown the party fever could/would have dispersed guerilla style throughout Lansing.

Be that as it may, this person was a hard core partier for a number of years – starting as a young teen (and today, in her early fiftiesis slowing down only reluctantly due to severe health issues). To this day she shows signs of radically undeveloped impulse control. I have to wonder whether this was a result of frying her brains before they were even all there yet.

More to the point, this anecdote suggests the question of whether alcohol alone can adversely impact brain development – and, if so, in what amounts at what ages. I think research on this point should be a factor in determining a legal starting age, if an age is to be set.

Just a thought,
-Steve

P.S.

As I preview, I’m struck that much of your concern is with sociocultural factors in youthful alcohol abuse, whereas I have focused enturely on legal reform. There probably needs to be a massive re-evaluation of drinking customs at all levels of society. This probably cannot be handled as public policy per se. It would be just silly to try to outlaw or regulate “quarter bounce” or other popular drinking games, for instance. However, people of good will could take leadership in creating new more humane drinking customs. Surely this will be complicated by the social power of the alcohol industry – but it would be interesting nonetheless.

And on a final note, is it true as I seem to observe that seeing multiple generations of a family partying at the bar together is more common in “working class” settings then among “preps”? And if so, why?

-Steve

Here are a few books that are somewhat related:
- on status: “Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids” by Milner, Jr.
- on age segregation: “How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture” by Chudacoff
- on criminalization: “The Lost Population: Status Offenders in America” by McNamara

But most of the crunchy data on these topics is published in journals (mostly psych and soc) and I don’t have those articles readily available. Sadly, it’s been 6 years since I’ve read that literature so I don’t have articles at the tip of my tongue.