Comments on: Drink Drank Drunk

By: Carl

Carl — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:35:17 +0000

I work at a dry campus (woe is me) and I sometimes slip a little Foucault-Lite to the students by talking about thresholds of transgression. If you know that a certain fraction of the population will turn any disciplinary regime into an opportunity for petty thrill rebellion, you can actually calibrate the response pretty well. Just put the highest value of risky behavior you can tolerate over the line into bad so that’s where people feel like they’re getting away with something. If you want people to keep their speed in the sixties, set the speed limit at 55. If you want people to stay away from smack, make pot illegal. If you want to keep alcohol consumption among late teens down to a dull roar behind closed doors, as Laura said, ban it entirely. Of course there will always be outliers who go apeshit, but that’s going to be true no matter what.

There are some serious problems with this Jedi mind trick, but it’s a good conversation and gets us deeper into Foucault.

By: dmerkow

dmerkow — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:16:37 +0000

I’ll simply note that I agree with the college presidents pretty much entirely. Moving drinking into public and legal spaces won’t stop drunken behavior but it changes how and why one might consume it. However, I understand the fear that allowing 18y/o would introduce alcohol onto the high school scene in a much larger way – which is bad. We don’t really need more widespread alcohol in that age group. It would seem to me that choosing 19 (as it is in many parts of Canada) would affect a few freshmen in college but mostly prevent it from becoming a part of the legal high school scene.

This would also help restore college neighborhoods, because it would take the house parties culture that services the underage crowd and hopefully move it back into college bars where a level of public policing would be more available.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:44:23 +0000

I remember rather hilariously that the drinking age where I went to college went up by a year every October, starting in my freshman year. My birthday is in September. So for four years in a row, I was legal for about three weeks and then illegal for the next 11 months.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:41:45 +0000

What about the smoking age? Why is it 18? Is it less harmful to smoke at 18 than it is at 16? Thought I’d throw *that* red herring out there.

When I was growing up, the drinking age shifted from 18 to 21 when I was 16. Those who were 18 at the time of the shift were “grandfathered” in, so it was a confusing time for bars, liquor stores, and restaurants. It was fairly easy for a 16 yo to get alcohol. I think it still is. The thing is, the legal prohibition didn’t prevent me from underage drinking. It made me careful about where and when. In high school, we never drank at a bar, always at someone’s house. In college, you knew which bars were friendly to underage drinkers and which weren’t. Hint: it helped if they were owned by the local mafia.

It doesn’t solve the larger issue, which is a problem with driving as well, and that is the process of learning to drink responsibly. I’m of the opinion that if the drinking age is lowered, families *might* be more likely to teach their kids how to drink–one or two is okay, 17 is asking for a trip to the hospital.

Maybe the solution for colleges is to have the drinking age be 24 or 25, so that for residential colleges, they’re not dealing with the legal/illegal divide.

By: hestal

hestal — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:24:11 +0000

Automobile insurance companies are able to charge higher rates to young men because data show that they are more likely to drive recklessly. In my day a male driver had to be 25 to avoid high rates. Whatever the data show, we should make the drinking age the same as the lower insurance rate age. If it is still 25 then so be it. It is one thing to make a mistake by joining the military (if it is a mistake) and quite another to drive while drunk. If a college bans smoking then they should ban drinking. Nothing hard about that.