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Lower the Drinking Age?
Aug. 20th, 2008 10:15 amBack in the relatively care-free days of early 2001, a happy-fun scandal du jour was new president Bush's twin daughters getting nailed for under-age drinking. As much as I like seeing the rich and powerful getting caught, I was disturbed by this, and I would routinely ask people, "Were the Bush twins tried for under-age drinking as adults?"
Of course they were. They were 20 years old at the time.
The 21-year-old drinking age is an abomination. Either someone is an adult, or they're not. It makes no sense that someone can own a bar and not be allowed to enter it. More to the point, segregating adults' legal rights by age is a very slippery slope, which fortunately we haven't tested yet.
Now, a consortium of college presidents are throwing in the towel and asking legislatures to lower the drinking age back to 18. They claim the practical benefit of bringing drinking back out into the open, where it can be more easily controlled.
MADD, of course, is completely flipping their lids. Jeffrey Levy, one of MADD's board of directors, said:
What Levy is forgetting, of course, is that the concept of in loco parentis applies to children. Like it or not, college students are legally adults.
Don't get me wrong: when MADD started, their "blood borders" argument was valid. State borders where the age was 18 on one side and 21 on the other saw exactly the problem of young adults driving to the state with the lower age, getting drunk, and then driving back. A uniform age did indeed fix that problem.
But there was no reason to make that uniform age anything except the age of majority.
Of course they were. They were 20 years old at the time.
The 21-year-old drinking age is an abomination. Either someone is an adult, or they're not. It makes no sense that someone can own a bar and not be allowed to enter it. More to the point, segregating adults' legal rights by age is a very slippery slope, which fortunately we haven't tested yet.
Now, a consortium of college presidents are throwing in the towel and asking legislatures to lower the drinking age back to 18. They claim the practical benefit of bringing drinking back out into the open, where it can be more easily controlled.
MADD, of course, is completely flipping their lids. Jeffrey Levy, one of MADD's board of directors, said:
"Their facts are terribly wrong. They want to take themselves off the hook. If they change the law, it's not their problem."
[...]
"Colleges are not willing to be the bad guy and parents want them to."
What Levy is forgetting, of course, is that the concept of in loco parentis applies to children. Like it or not, college students are legally adults.
Don't get me wrong: when MADD started, their "blood borders" argument was valid. State borders where the age was 18 on one side and 21 on the other saw exactly the problem of young adults driving to the state with the lower age, getting drunk, and then driving back. A uniform age did indeed fix that problem.
But there was no reason to make that uniform age anything except the age of majority.
