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with just about every possible alcohol policy under the sun) doing something similar before 1977 when it was rescinded.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.