2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
3. The article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
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This amendment repealed the 18th amendment and made it legal to drink and consume alcoholic beverages.
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11/19/2009
A Lower Drinking Age?
That would be a bad way to deal with binge drinking on campuses.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
SOME THINGS only seem like a good idea at 3 a.m. Increasingly, the Amethyst Letter, which more than 100 college presidents and chancellors signed last year to advocate rethinking the drinking age, looks like one of them. A study just published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that binge drinking has decreased nationwide with the increased drinking age -- everywhere but on college campuses.
A variety of factors may contribute to the decline in binge drinking among young non-students -- the presence of parents, the demands of jobs, more difficult access to drinking-age peers. But the lessons for school administrators are clear. Where the drinking age is enforced, harmful drinking behaviors have been in overall decline. But on campuses, binge drinking has remained stable -- or gotten worse. And in areas such as women's binge drinking that have increased in the population at large, the increase for college students has outpaced that for their non-student peers.
Those on college campuses who favor a lower drinking age point out that students will decide to drink regardless of the law, and forcing them to do so in secret and illegally will make behaviors such as binge drinking harder to monitor. But outside college campuses, where underage drinking is clearly prohibited, young people more often have made the decision not to drink. This, in turn, has helped drive down drunk driving, assault and other unsafe behaviors. For further proof, college administrators should consider their drug policies; the perception that drug use will not be tolerated can and does influence students' choices.
The journal's study drives home the fact that, when young people know that the law will be upheld, they adjust their behavior. It's time for college administrators to stop passing the buck to the drinking age and start taking their in loco parentis role more seriously. Instead of complaining about the drinking age, they should try enforcing it.
Thoughts:
I think that the reason more college students binge drink is because of the easy obtained in school. Although kids start university at around 19 or 20, most kids won't finish school until they are 24 or later. This means that the kids who live on campus knows more people who are over the drinking age and can get the alcohol. With the lack of adult supervision in dorms, kids party and have fun.
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11/19/2009
Alcohol: Lowering the Drinking Age to 18
(Editor's Note: This is the first part of a short two-part series on the topic of the drinking age. To read the second installment, please go here.)
by Jeff Siegel*
This is, oddly enough, one of the newest and most interesting approaches to fighting alcoholism. The theory, as propounded by a surprising number of experts, including some police as well as university presidents who are part of the Amethyst Initiative, says it may be the best way to fight an unprecedented wave of binge drinking and similar problems among college students. Take away the legal barrier, and you’ll take away a lot of the thrill and the incentive.
Or, as the police chief in Boulder, Colo., home to the hard-partying University of Colorado, told 60 Minutes: “The abuse of alcohol and the over-consumption of alcohol and DUI driving...are the areas we've got to focus our efforts. Not on chasing kids around trying to give them a ticket for having a cup of beer in their hand."
The drinking age issue, of course, is nothing new. It’s even not just about the drinking age anymore. In my part of the liquor world, where I write about wine, the dark forces that oppose more equitable laws that regulate wine distribution always play the underage drinking card to preserve their monopoly.
As Megan Haverkorn, the editor of the trade e-letter Wine & Spirits Daily wrote: “We believe the drinking age requirement at least deserves some dispassionate debate and research among policy makers. Whether it’s the right decision or not, the issue shouldn’t be squashed without giving it the attention it deserves.”
Having said all this, I don’t know the answer. On the one hand, I remember when the drinking age was 21 in Illinois, where I grew up, and 18 in neighboring Wisconsin. It was a rite of passage to hop in the car on your 18th birthday and drive across the state line to get liquored up. And if I did it, and I was a boring, responsible 18-year-old, you can imagine what everyone else did.
On the other hand, there is good evidence that underage drinking is out of control. The Amethyst group notes that “a culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ — often conducted off-campus — has developed. Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.”
One of the most telling points on their side is that drinking bans tend to increase alcoholism. During Prohibition, the U.S. rate actually increased, and economists have discovered something called the Iron Law of Prohibition: The more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes. Which sounds a lot like binge-drinking, doesn’t it?
*Jeff Siegel is also the author of the blog, The Wine Curmudgeon; this part of the series is adapted from a posting on that blog.
Thoughts:
I think that lowering the drinking age would possible help with all the binge drinking, but people are still going to drink. Not as much underage drinking would be going on, but you would have more people drinking and driving because more people would be able to get the alcohol and provide it.
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