Columnist Jack Davies argues that the drinking age needs to be lowered.
A long line of the disheveled shuffles along a secluded back road, their eyes sullen, backs bent as if under sacks; those who could not make it any farther slump onto the roadside to recover. Police stand on both sides urging the line on, as night falls and moonlight softly illuminates the grim scene, mixing with the sirens casting an ethereal glow on the faces of the crowd. One imagines that if you were to turn around, you would see a city in flames accompanied with the gentle lament of cellos and the hurried orders of a desperate rear guard.
But no, the scene is not so dramatic. Instead, we see the infamous "zombie walk," the end of yet another Number Fest, one of Athens’ many awesome outpourings of drunken debauchery. May we stop and ask ourselves why fests end that way? It’s certainly not safe, and in a nation obsessed with safety, the danger our drinking laws cause is dangerously overlooked. I would argue that such moments of excess are caused not by alcohol and not by the nature of large fests (which are awesome, by the way, Puritans should get out more), but by the state of total prohibition enforced on people under age 21.
Wait! You may shout, that is absurd — alcohol is a social problem, and people under the traditional age where the keys to the house are given are too irresponsible to make safe decisions about their consumption. There is, however, a simple answer to that objection: At my present age, I can vote (if I wasn’t a foreign national), serve as a conscript in times of war, be tried as an adult, go to prison, drive, get married and hold any job in the United States except those political offices with an age limit.
It is a tired tirade — the "old enough to fight, old enough to vote" style argument has been used since World War II for a variety of causes. The argument is so tired perhaps people forget the deeper point being made when people use it. The point is that American political culture believes in republican citizenship. That means people are assumed to possess "rights" unless there is some valid reason why it is necessary to limit them.
Arguments for age limits tend to come from the Kantian tradition of liberal thought that states that children are not yet moral persons, where moral personhood is defined as the ability to reason about the truths of morality, act according to reason and thus need to be kept away from danger until a point has been reached when they can reason for themselves.
Now I am not a rationalist and believe that act (rather than person-focused, or virtue) systems of ethics are problematic, for various reasons I will not go into here, but that is the reasoning. However, the state has reasoned that at age 18 we can choose to spend the rest of our lives with someone, go to war and be held accountable for our actions at the criminal level. Those decisions are of a much graver nature than choosing to drink.
Even after making such an argument, the resident moral guardians will point to the youth’s binge-drinking problem. The binge-drinking problem is a direct result of our bizarre drinking laws and the culture of prohibition that it creates. Prohibiting youth drinking drives it underground, creating a black market with all of the problems that a black market produces.
People are forced to drink outside of the public eye, forcing them into basements, friends' houses and seedy venues. Because most of the people involved in such parties also are underage, they are less likely to call for help for fear of sanction and prosecution if problems arise, which also leads to drunken driving.
People are made to feel as if they need to drink more before going out for fear of being carded, which makes more drunken, less alert people who are more likely literally to stumble into dangerous situations, such as blacking out, sleeping outside, getting arrested or worse.
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There is also the mystique surrounding alcohol that comes from making it illegal, which means that people are going to drink more of it when it is offered, or resort to more serious crime such as using fake IDs in order to obtain it. In nations with less restrictive drinking laws and early introduction to alcohol as a natural part of childhood, you see a much safer drinking culture emerge.
When you make something illegal, it should come as no surprise that people will act like criminals to obtain it. Whether it’s the safety of underage drinkers, the general public or plain common sense you care about, I’m sure we can all agree that the drinking age is too damn high!
Jack Davies is a sophomore studying philosophy and the Honors Tutorial College senator in Student Senate. Do you think the drinking age should be lowered? Email him at jd814213@ohio.edu.
