Beer Me!

Badgerbraü! Ok, probably not.

There’s some discussion going on right now about the idea of lowering the drinking age in America to 18, or at least allowing states to do so. The logic runs like this: at 18 you’re old enough to drive, vote, serve your country, buy porn and ciggarettes, so shouldn’t you be allowed to drink?

Allow me a little personal digression here. I didn’t have my first taste of alcohol until comparitively late in life. While I’m sure a great many of my peers were going out and getting hammered from thirteen onward, I didn’t have any booze until the age of twenty-five. Yep, twenty-five. It was generic vodka from Oregon mixed with Safeway-brand orange juice. It was not a taste sensation.

Over the years I’ve had a drink or two on other occasions, but never very much. Probably a combined total of less than five servings of alcohol in my entire life. Part of this is that I’ve never had the desire to drink and certainly never had the desire to be drunk (I figure my hold on reality is tenous enough without adding alcohol into the mix). Part of it also is that I’ve never really had any alcohol that I actually liked (exception: some drink I had that mixed cranberry juice and vodka. I think that’s a Cosmopolitan, right?).

So given my lack of experience with drinking, perhaps I’m not the person who should be commenting on this. On the other hand, I’m the sort of person who comments on anything regardless of his level of personal experience, so there you go.

I do know that in this country we have a very unhealthy relationship with drinking. Like so many things in our nation we tell people it’s for adults only and then give kind of a wink and a nod to teenagers going out and doing it. It’s pretty much expected that people won’t wait until they’re 21 to have their first drink. Indeed, it’s expected that most people will have it around 15 or 16. So right away we see that the culture and the law don’t exactly jibe with each other.

I also know that in much of Europe, for example, the drinking age is far lower than it is here, going as low as 5 in some areas, and in other places not having any real age at all. Last time I checked, most of European society isn’t on the verge of collapse from younger people drinking (or, indeed, from any other cause).

I would favor lowering the drinking age here in the USA. Down to 18, certainly. I’d like it if our culture would allow it to be even lower, but I know that’s not going to happen. By the same token, I’d like to see the driving age raised to 18. I don’t trust people at the age of sixteen to be able to drive a ton of metal at 65mph and do so safely (oddly, I trust them to decide what to do with their bodies, so there you go).

The logic that at 18 we as a nation trust people to do everything except drink seems odd to me. We’d let someone at 18 go off and die for their country, but we wouldn’t let them have a beer before hand. That seems wrong to me, as does the fact that at 18 you’re allowed to smoke, which is arguably far more dangerous than drinking.

All that the current drinking age does is encourage people who are underage to binge when they do have access to booze. Since they don’t know for sure when they’ll have it again, they’ll be more inclined to drink to excess when they do get it. This is very similar to what happened during Prohibition, where people would go into speakeasies and walk out nearly blind.

By the time you’re eighteen you’re supposed to be wise enough to make whatever choices you want regarding your body. You can drive, smoke, vote, fuck whomever you want, masturbate to the porn of your choice, hold office (in some categories), live on your own, get married, sign contracts, and die for your country. But god forbid you should have a shot of whiskey.

That needs to change.