Should It Be Legal For An 18-Year-Old To Have A Beer?

In this week's edition of Parade, there's an article which asks whether raising the minimum drinking age to 21 has been good policy, and moreover whether it's fair that an 18-year-old can take a bullet or be blown up by an IED in Iraq or Afghanistan, but can't have a Budweiser with his friends at a bar before leaving home.....

No one is suggesting that 18-year-olds should drink themselves into a stupor. Rather, critics of the current drinking laws point out that a sizable minority of 18- to 20-year-olds, and roughly a fifth of 16- and 17-year-olds, already drink heavily often or on occasion. Indeed, the 21 drinking age isn’t so much a law as a slogan: Even supporters concede it is widely flouted and often not enforced. Yet, because 18-year-olds—adults in most other senses —generally can’t drink legally in bars and restaurants, they tend to drink in dorm rooms, on isolated fields and at unsupervised house parties, where adults can’t watch them.

After the disaster that was prohibition, the 21st Amendment left it to the states to make their own decisions about alcohol, which they are free to delegate to cities & counties. This is why if you go down to Mississippi, you can still find "dry" counties where all alcohol is prohibited.

However, 23 years ago the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed. It basically created a de facto national drinking age, by telling all states if they didn't raise the age of purchase for alcohol to 21 the federal government could withhold up to 10% of federal highway funds allotted to any offending state. South Dakota resisted, but the act was upheld by the Supreme Court which found it did not violate the 10th or 21st Amendments, since the law was not compulsory and was intended for the "general welfare". This resulted in the United States having the highest drinking age in the world.

But why 21? Why not 20 or 25? Also, is it not illogical to argue that someone is responsible enough to vote for the President & members of federal & state government at 18, but we can't trust them with a Miller Lite? Add into this every other right & responsibility that occurs at 18.....

• Legally adjudicated an adult for trial in a court of law.
• Can be drafted or join the military & fight in a war.
• Can work a full-time 40 hour work week job.
• Can buy semi-automatic weapons.
• Can enter into legally enforceable contracts.

The "general welfare" argument used to pass National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, was to reduce the rates of drunk driving related fatalities, by reducing the chance of persons 18-20 getting into a car drunk & having an accident. And groups like MADD (who was a big impetus for passing the 84 law) point to NTSB statistics to validate the worth of having the 21 age limit.....

The evidence, widely touted by Rosenker of the NTSB, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other activist groups, rests in a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, which estimated that from 1975 to 2003, higher drinking ages saved 22,798 lives on America’s roadways.

"Twenty-five thousand lives is a lot of people to set aside when you’re looking at a current problem," said Brian Demers, a 20-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a member of MADD’s board of directors.

However, the methodology of the NTSB's numbers have been disputed by those who want the age limit lowered to 18.....

They have questioned the NHTSA study, which did not explain how it arrived at its estimate. Moreover, it counted any accident as "alcohol-related" if any participant was legally drunk — including victims who may not have been responsible for the accident.

"The methodology used has been widely criticized by scholars," said Hanson, of SUNY-Potsdam, who called the report "really more of a guesstimate" that showed only a correlation of numbers, not a causal relationship. In fact, he said, alcohol-related traffic fatalities among minor drivers were already declining before 1984, when the drinking-age measure was passed.

Earlier this year, the Marine Corps gave base commanders & COs discretion to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 at military facilities & overseas.....

The Corps-wide drinking age has been lowered from 21 to 18 for Marines on liberty overseas and for leathernecks taking part in official on-base command functions — including the birthday ball.

[...]But the commandant’s changes go further than any other service’s policy, decriminalizing welcome-home beer for underage Marines returning from deployment and giving commanders the authority to hold an 18-and-up kegger on base upon a unit’s return from a war zone.

And there’s no need to hide a flask in your sock before the birthday ball, because the commandant has you covered there, too. As long as your unit holds its celebration on base, commanders can drop the drinking age to 18 in the U.S. under "special circumstances," and even authorize the possession and consumption of alcohol by underage Marines in the barracks.

[...]Spokesmen for the Army, Navy and Air Force confirmed that the Corps is the only service with a policy that allows personnel under age 21 to drink in the U.S. The other services have adopted policies that leave the drinking age up to applicable state laws. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have set the legal age for purchase and possession at 21.