Why Is The 21 Drinking Age So Sacred?

Few laws are as uniquely sacred in the USA today as the 21 drinking age laws.  They are essentially a "third rail" of politics, even more so than Social Security.  And yet these laws are widely disobeyed by the vast majority of Americans at some point in their lives.  So what gives?

It clearly cannot be about saving lives, because speed limits would be even more of a matter of life and death, and yet those are never treated even remotely as sacred as the 21 drinking age.  They are openly flouted and scoffed at by most people, and the penalties and enforcement are pretty lax to this day.  The erstwhile national 55 speed limit was in fact mercilessly mocked and gradually weakened until it was ultimately jettisoned in the 1990s despite (ultimately quite accurate) warnings of "blood on the highways".  And even worse, speed limits on other streets, roads, and especially "stroads" have been raised higher as well, with very deadly consequences, and a fortiori for pedestrians and cyclists (hey, remember them?).  Speed kills, even more so than drunk driving these days, and yet, as one commenter noted, we don't have "Mothers Against Fast Driving", we have the Speed Channel instead.  Likewise, distracted driving, especially by smartphones, is at an all-time high, and people just cavalierly LOL it off for the most part.

(It's all fun and games, until they crash right into a kid on a bike, who is killed or maimed.  Not so funny now, is it?)

And even for drunk driving, the current (generous by international standards) blood alcohol limit of 0.08% for people over 21, let alone lowering it to 0.05% (except in Utah), seems to have far less popular support than the 21 drinking age or zero-tolerance laws for people under 21.  

And also, when they cut the federal alcohol taxes in 2018, ostensibly to boost the economy, there were few voices against it, and even those voices were far more muffled than to they would have been if they had had the temerity to (gasp!) even partially repeal the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984.  So the drinking age is not even entirely about alcohol per se then, even if there is clearly some neo-prohibitionist impulse involved as well.

Thus, we can conclude that the 21 drinking age is really about power and control, along with an irrational fear of young people.  Which of course dovetails with being comparatively lax with the privileged age group that is currently in power, as tyranny is always whimsical.  And now the proverbial emperor is naked for all to see.

Chesterton's Fence Revisited

One very important philosophical principle is that of Chesterton's Fence, by author G.K. Chesterton.  

Per Wikipedia:

"Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton's 1929 book, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, in the chapter, "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

In other words, before you remove or destroy a fence (or policy), make sure you know why it was put up in the first place.  That's just common sense.

(Hey DOGE, are you listening?  Seriously!)

Of course, the apocryphal "Five Monkeys Experiment" is a good foil to counterbalance that principle.  That is, sometimes various policies really have outlived their usefulness, were rotten from the start, and/or do far more harm than good.  And wisdom is to know the difference between the two cases.

(The latter pitfall is sometimes called "status quo bias".)

So where does that leave the 21 drinking age then?  Well it seems to be a bit of both, in fact.  On the one hand, the reason why they raised the drinking age to 21 in the 1980s was ostensibly to combat drunk driving at times when drunk driving was widely considered normal and socially acceptable, and generally not taken very seriously.  At the same time, any other justification (such as junk neuroscience) given for it now is an after-the-fact rationalization, so anything other than drunk driving came be considered a "Five Monkeys" case.  Back to the original justification, that has long since passed it's sell-by date for the following reasons:

• Countries that did NOT raise their drinking ages to 21, even car cultures like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, saw similar or greater declines in teen and young adult traffic deaths, both alcohol-related and otherwise, than the USA did during and right after the time that the drinking ages were in flux.  They did not diverge in the expected direction, and if anything diverged in the "wrong" direction.
• The 12 states that had been 21 since the 1930s and 1940s, and thus did not change their drinking ages at all since then, also saw similar declines in teen and young adult traffic deaths during that time period.
• Several good and rigorous studies, including, but not limited to, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), Dee and Evans (2001), Grant (2011), and others, have either cast major doubt on the idea of the 21 drinking age having a significant net lifesaving effect, or even debunked it entirely.
• It's literally well into the 21st century now.  Drunk driving is no longer socially acceptable in the USA, and is taken far more seriously now than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. America is almost a completely different country now than it was back then.
• Rideshare services like Uber and Lyft exist now as well, and young people are taking longer than ever now to get their driver's licenses.
• We know now that there are far more effective ways of reducing alcohol-related harms of all kinds, such as raising the taxes on alcohol, limiting alcohol outlet density, improving alcohol education, and most importantly of all, seriously cracking down on actual drunk driving, drunk violence, drunk vandalism, and stuff like that.  Rather than merely "flatten the curve", doing so can actually CRUSH the curve for good.

Thus, having applied the principle of Chesterton's Fence, we can conclude that the 21 drinking age can be safely tossed aside like so much garbage, and without looking back.

So what are we waiting for?

Would A Graduated Drinking Age Be Better? (Part Deux)

In our previous post, we discussed the idea of possibly having a split (graduated) drinking age for the first few years of lowering the drinking age, whether for quantity limits, beverage type, or both.  And we concluded that we would be open to that, but ONLY if that would eventually sunset to make it 18 across the board within a few years at most.  Remember, our goal at Twenty-One Debunked remains to fully lower it to 18, and not a day later.

Another idea could be to lower it completely to 18 for on-premise purchases (bars and restaurants), while requiring anyone 18-20 buying alcohol at stores for off-premise consumption to simply have someone 21 or older with them for the purchase, except if those 18-20 have and present a college or military ID.  And they could not have anyone under 18 with them (except their own children) either.  That would be more than enough to discourage 18-20 year olds from buying for their younger friends, which of course would still remain just as illegal as it is now.  

And of course, 18-20 year olds should be fully allowed to drink, possess, and be furnished alcohol in private as well, just like people over 21 currently are.  That would be head and shoulders better than ONLY allowing them to possess and consume alcohol on premise, a truly half-baked idea which would thus create a perverse incentive to drive under the influence, especially in rural areas where such a policy would be tantamount to legalized entrapment in practice.

What about the fear of "blood borders" between states that lower their drinking ages while adjacent states remain 21?  Well, first of all, that is really no worse than the problem of dry counties adjacent to wet counties in terms of perverse incentives to drive under the influence.  (And we sure as hell don't blame it on the wet counties!)  Secondly, they could always have it be where on premise establishments less than X number of miles from the state line of such adjacent states would not be allowed to accept out of state IDs for people under 21 from those specific states, except in college towns for those who also show a college ID.  And the same "temporary residence" exception should also apply to hotels serving their overnight guests as well.  There is a precedent for Wisconsin (a state that has experimented with just about every possible alcohol policy under the sun) doing something similar before 1977 when it was rescinded.

Another "novel" idea:  simply enforce existing laws against actual drunk driving better.  Checkpoints and/or roving patrols can really go a long way yo reduce the problem.

But should we even bother to start out with a compromised position at all?  That remains an open question.

The pro-21 crowd really lives in an alternate reality, it seems.  Just recently, I was debating someone on Reddit that kept on fruitlessly picking apart the methodology of Miron and Tetelbaum's groundbreaking 2009 study that thoroughly debunked the idea that the 21 drinking age saved lives.  The person I debated with kept on straining at proverbial gnats and swallowing proverbial camels, tossing red herrings, using the word "weird" repeatedly for anything they disagreed with, and kept failing to actually refute it.  The pro-21 crowd really cannot to see the forest for the trees, it seems.  They are apparently way too left-brained to do so (and perhaps smooth-brained as well).

The point being:  trying to reason with them is fundamentally an exercise in futility.  And compromising with them would also likely be just as futile as well.

Would A Graduated Drinking Age Be Better?

Twenty-One Debunked has long called for the drinking age to be lowered to 18, completely, and yesterday is not soon enough.  And that hasn't changed one iota since our founding in 2009, and it never will.  That's our North Star.

But what about a phase-in period to make the age lowering more likely to get passed at all?  We have already proposed for the first few years of the new law, to have it remain at 21 for kegs, cases, handles (large bottles) of liquor, and other bulk quantities, while otherwise lowering it to 18 yesterday, and having the higher age limit automatically sunset after X number of years (likely three to five years).  And also, keep the zero tolerance age at 21 for drinking and driving as well for the first few years.  The question remains, however:  what if that still is not enough to realistically get it passed?  We face an extremely uphill battle these days, after all.

Thus, we at Twenty-One Debunked would now grudgingly support, and ONLY for the first few years at most, also keeping the purchase age at 21 for the first few years for hard liquor, or really anything with more than 18% alcohol by volume.  Everything else in non-bulk quantities would be lowered to 18 right away, while the higher age limit would automatically sunset to 18 within a few years.  The higher age limit would not apply to drinking the liquor, of course, only for the specific act of buying it.

Alternatively, the higher age limit can be phased down gradually to 20, then 19, then 18 as well.

The higher age limit could also be kept for all internet, phone, or delivery app orders of alcohol for the first few years as well, and also perhaps have shorter trading hours allowed for off-premise sales for those below that age.

All of this would pour cold water over any real or imagined fears of a short-term increase alcohol-related problems and casualties among teens and young adults, particularly those involving high school students and keggers.  (Longer-term problems and casualties resulting from a lower drinking age have already been thoroughly debunked by Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) and several other studies, of course.)

Hey, if it actually gets us to our real goal sooner than being absolute purists about it would, why not?  Especially in light of the fact that there are more and more places (coffee shops, movie theaters, etc.) these days that serve beer, wine, cider, and/or alcopops, but not hard liquor.  That said, we will NOT support any further compromises beyond that, as that would be a compromise OF a compromise, and thus that would ultimately vitiate our goal of lowering to 18.

So what are we waiting for?

Prohibition Versus Taxation Revisited

Blast from the past:  Rediscovering two studies from the 1990s by Professor Donald S. Kenkel:

PROHIBITION VERSUS TAXATION: RECONSIDERING THE LEGAL DRINKING AGE (1993)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1993.tb00389.x

"The legal drinking age targets a group at a high risk of alcohol-related problems. This paper argues that taxation could achieve the same benefits as the legal drinking age at a substantially lower social cost. Existing empirical research suggests that simultaneously lowering the legal age to 18 and taxing alcohol purchases at between 12 to 86 percent of the current price would achieve the same results as the current legal age. Levying a special teen tax only on young adults would minimize its social costs. Teen tax revenues between $564 million to $4.03 billion measure the net social gain of replacing the current prohibition on young adults' alcohol purchases with a taxation policy."

And the other one from three years later:

NEW ESTIMATES OF THE OPTIMAL TAX ON ALCOHOL (1996)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1996.tb01379.x

"In this paper I use a new data set to estimate the optimal alcohol tax rate. As a benchmark, the empirical results imply that the optimal tax rate is over 100 percent of the net-of-tax price. However, alcohol taxation is a second-best solution to the problems associated with alcohol abuse. I conclude that the optimal alcohol tax rate would be much lower if punishment for drunk driving were more certain and severe. Government provision of information about the health consequences of heavy drinking would also remove part of the efficiency rationale for alcohol taxes."

Twenty-One Debunked does NOT support the idea of different tax rates for different ages, as that idea would likely be impractical and still discriminatory.  It is essentially a left-brain dominant idea that mistakes the map for the territory, and almost a full-blown category error.  In that vein, Kenkel really begins to coast after being off to a good start otherwise.  And, as we see from the second study three years later, the level of the optimal tax is within the range of what would be needed to offset the putative social costs of lowering the drinking age to 18, and vice-versa.

And as we have seen from Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) and Dee and Evans (2001), and many other studies, the supposed benefits of the 21 drinking age are overstated at best, and likely non-existent in the long run.  And in fact, Miron and Tetelbaum also found by the way that the beer tax has a larger lifesaving effect than the 21 drinking age.

Putting it all together, even a relatively modest hike in the alcohol taxes would be enough to offset the supposed negative effects of lowering the drinking age to 18, especially if we also make the punishment for DUI more certain and severe (which we certainly support).  In fact, the late Mark Kleiman (hardly a libertarian zealot) actually recommended many years ago that we should abolish the drinking age entirely, and raise the alcohol tax to a level that would roughly double the price of alcohol (similar to current Canadian prices).  And while the Overton window would strongly preclude something so audacious at this time, he does make a good point regardless.

So what are we waiting for?  Lower the drinking age to 18, raise the alcohol taxes, get tougher on actual drunk driving and drunk violence, and let America be America again!