LEGAL DRINKING AGE

The Legal Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18

The Legal Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18

Like sex, alcohol has long been an issue on which the governance of individuals and their desires converges with the governance of the health and the morals of national populations. Moreover, like sex, drinking has often been targeted more to maintain urban order and civility than to improve the health of either individuals or populations.

Today, the most important kind of targeted prohibition is that which is age specific (Babor, 2003). In Europe the usual “drinking age” is sixteen, with some jurisdictions (England and Wales, for example) drawing distinctions between youths drinking with their parents and those drinking on their own. In the United States, by contrast, the drinking age has been raised in recent years in many states to as high as twenty-one, a legal change in sharp conflict with changes to lower age rules governing voting and military service. Traffic accidents are generally cited as the reason for this unusual ban on consumption, but there has been no public discussion of the possibility of raising the driving age instead, which suggests that there is still a lingering moral concern about drinking itself, not only about associated risks(Miller, 2006).

Other kinds of targeted prohibitions used elsewhere reflect local hierarchies. In nineteenth-century British Africa, “natives” were in some colonies prohibited from buying hard liquor or from buying foreign-made liquor, in an effort to impose British beer-drinking habits on populations used to palm wine or other drinks. In general, throughout the twentieth century, race declined in importance as a legal criterion for specific prohibitions, while age assumed greater prominence.

Most U.S. individuals who drink alcohol begin in adolescence or early adulthood. Among those who drink regularly, frequency of consumption tends to increase and quantity (i.e., ...