Wine Stained Barrels
So maybe last time I posted about this I was not being as serious as I could have been. In fact I believe I was not being serious at all. But I do actually have a way to alter drinking age laws to prevent colleges getting sued for unsupervised and prevent heavy drinking in high school.
Make the drinking age a two tiered system. Have it be legal for those over the age of eighteen to drink alcohol, be it at a bar, a pub, a restaurant or a friends house. But keep the twenty-one year old limitation of purchasing alcohol. If those under eighteen want to drink at a friends house, at home or in a dorm setting they will still need someone over twenty-one to buy them their drinks, which is happening anyway. If they can buy their own drinks at bars or other places then they are in a supervised (relatively) area and those concerned will know where they are.
Another benefit for this system is that stores and business that sell alcohol will not need to change any of their rules or policies since for them nothing will have changed. Twenty-one will still be the age to purchase alcohol for off-site consumption so the store can keep their current signs and training methods. Furthermore this will prevent (if it is done on a state level and not federal) interstate booze runs. Kids from one state won’t be driving across state lines in order to purchase alcohol and bring it back.
The main concern about those drinking under the age of twenty-one is drunk driving. Drunk driving is not okay at any age and to help prevent it in this eighteen to twenty-one range there should be harsher punishments for DUI for these ages then for those over twenty-one. A large fine and rescinding their drivers license for a year or so should help deter (I know this is essentially the current punishment) younger DUIs.
Allowing for younger people to drink legally at a younger age will promote and encourage responsible drinking. With it being legal schools can teach responsible drinking practices openly without fear of retribution and lawsuits.
I spent last year in Scotland where the drinking age across the board is eighteen. My friends and I did not go out and binge drink every night as can happen at home, rather we just went out to a pub had a few drinks and walked back without getting completely wasted, blacking out and waking up the next evening. I do not think that America is ready for an overall drinking age of eighteen, but lowering part of it will help with many of the problems faced by Universities and other establishments on how to address a problem that seems so prevalently embedded into our culture.
Walk the Grass 