The Stupid Literally Burns Like Cigarettes

In Australia, there is quite a furor right now among the chattering classes in regards to a sharp increase in teen tobacco smoking from 2018 to 2023 after over two straight decades of decline.  And one of the things people are blaming is.....wait for it....vaping.  Because reasons.  Or something.  But there is one very glaring problem with this theory.  In Australia, vape products are technically legal, but ONLY if they do NOT contain any nicotine at all, thus kind of defeating the purpose.  That's right, nicotine vape products have never been approved for legal sales in Australia (and probably never will be any time soon), meaning anyone who wants to use them must either smuggle them in from abroad or buy them on the black market.  And interestingly enough, vaping itself also appears to be on the rise as well down under.  Thus, it truly takes a special kind of stupid to not only perversely create a situation where vaping and smoking both increase at the same time, but to then blame the increase in smoking on vaping.

Even more notable is the fact that in Australia, cigarettes have some of the highest taxes (and thus prices) in the world, plus so many other world-leading "best practices" tobacco control polices as well.  This additionally shows that while vice taxes and some other policies may work well to a point, all of these policies inherently have their limits in practice. 

Our working theory:  it is actually the banning of nicotine vaping, combined with the harmful effects of one of the strictest lockdown and Zero Covid regimes in the world, that ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the long fight against tobacco smoking, particularly for youth.  And we must stress that while nicotine in any form is far from benign and definitely NOT for kids, banning or unduly restricting vaping (which is still significantly safer than the known deadly habit of smoking that it often displaces) is therefore a net public health loser of a policy.  And a policy like Australia's that perversely increases "dual use" of both is even that much worse still.

One could even argue that their truly massive cigarette black market created by their insanely high taxes, especially combined with their vaping black market from their nicotine ban, actually increased underage (under 18) use of both products since black market sellers typically don't ask buyers for ID.

Note also how the increase did not begin until 2020 (implicating the lockdowns as a contributing cause), and occurred for 14-17 year olds but interestingly NOT 18-24 year olds (putting the lie to the idea that their age limit of 18, as opposed to 21, was in any way related).  Also note that in England, where the age limit is still 18 and vaping is literally promoted by public health authorities, teen smoking continued its long decline through at least 2021.  New Zealand, where the age limit was still 18 (until very, very recently), smoking rates among 15-24 year olds nosedived as soon as nicotine vaping was officially legalized in 2020, despite an even stricter lockdown there.  Thus it seems to be the combination of 1) black markets, 2) vaping bans, and 3) lockdowns that is the cause of the jump in teen smoking in Australia.

But good luck trying to convince the nanny-state zealots to use even a little bit of common sense!

QED

Halfway Decent Study, Wrong Conclusion

Much has been made of a recent Australia and New Zealand study finding that teens who drink regularly (at least once a week) before the age of 17, and especially by age 13, are statistically more likely to go on to drink heavily, become alcohol-dependent, drive drunk, use/abuse other substances, and smoke cigarettes during adulthood.  And while correlation itself does not prove causation, there may very well still be at least somewhat of a causal link all the same that cannot be readily explained away, particularly for those who begin any significant drinking before age 15.  That said, the specious conclusion that New Zealand and Australia somehow should raise their drinking ages any higher than 18 is unwarranted and not actually supported by the data in this study.

Take it from us in the USA, who have had a legal drinking age of 21 since the 1980s (and much earlier than that in some states).   It simply does NOT work, and merely forces drinking further underground and makes it far more dangerous than it has to be.   It infantilizes young people and erodes respect for the law, and overall does more harm than good.  So what should be done to reduce and/or delay youth drinking, assuming that is the goal?

• Raise the taxes on all alcoholic beverages across the board, ideally making such levies proportional to alcohol content.  That is the single most effective and cost-effective way to reduce alcohol-related harms without actually violating anyone's rights.  So raise them as high as you possibly can without triggering widespread moonshining and bootlegging.
• Set a minimum price floor for alcoholic beverages as well, for both on and off-premise sales.  Both this as well as raising alcohol taxes would have a larger impact on young people since they are more price-sensitive on average.
• Reduce alcohol outlet density in places where such outlet density is very high.
• Restrict or ban alcohol advertising, especially ads aimed at young people.
• Crack down on drunk driving, drunk violence, drunk vandalism, and drunk and disorderly conduct--for ALL ages.  Hold individuals accountable for their behavior, no matter how wasted they are.  Period.
• Increase alcohol education and treatment programs.  Yesterday.  And include social norms marketing in this broadly-defined education program.
• And last but not least, before they even consider raising the drinking age, how about actually enforcing the 18 drinking age they have now?  Seriously.  And by that, we mean targeting vendors with complicance checks, rather than the young people themselves.

And there you have it.  There are far better alternatives than raising the legal drinking age.  And raising the drinking age can actually work at cross-purposes with the alternatives discussed above.  True, delaying the onset of youth drinking--especially regular drinking--can evidently be beneficial to a point.  But when you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you ultimately end up with neither.

What Australia Gets Right

One thing our movement has a habit of doing is comparing the USA to Europe for the purpose of ascertaining what the effects of a lower drinking age would be like.  While there is some truth to such a comparison, the pro-21 side routinely calls us out on the important differences between here and there.  For example, they have much better public transportation than we do, they are more urbanized, driving licenses are much more difficult to obtain, gas prices are much higher, and thus they are much, much less of a car culture that we are.  All of which would dramatically affect traffic fatalities and skew any comparisons.  As a result, Twenty-One Debunked typically prefers to make comparisons to Canada instead, which is also a car culture that is the most similar to the USA.  And they have seen a similar or faster drop in traffic deaths than the USA despite NOT raising the drinking age to 21, and their traffic death rates have been consistently lower than the USA.  But there is also another major car culture as well with a drinking age of 18--Australia.

In the Land Down Under, they have in fact seen a faster drop in alcohol-related traffic deaths than the USA and even Canada since 1982 despite keeping the drinking age at 18.  Not only that, a recent study in Australia found essentially no link between being able to drink legally and motor vehicle accidents of any type, at least not in the state that was being studied, New South Wales.  Using a regression discontinuity design similar to the sort that pro-21 researchers have been doing lately, they found no discontinuous jump in such deaths or injuries in young people upon turning 18.  This stands in stark contrast to the USA, in which various pro-21 researchers have found a significant jump in alcohol-related deaths and injuries among young Americans upon turning 21, an increase that in many cases lingers well beyond one's 21st birthday.

Of course, such a phenomenon is not unique to the USA, as a jump in alcohol-related deaths and injuries has also been observed in Canada at their own respective MLDA (18 or 19, depending on the province), albeit of a shorter duration than in the USA and limited primarily to males who participate in "extreme" binge drinking.  It would seem that a powder-keg effect is unfortunately an almost inevitable consequence of the very concept of a drinking age, regardless of what it is.  So what does Australia do right that seems to defuse the powder keg?

Most importantly, Australia has tougher DUI laws, and tougher and more frequent enforcement of such laws.  For example, not only are penalties tougher, but the BAC limit is 0.05 (as opposed to 0.08 in the USA) and they have random breath testing (RBT), which is unconstitutional in both the USA and Canada.  Though one could argue that nowadays the USA effectively practices a form of "de-facto RBT" via a combination of "no-refusal" laws (i.e. the police often have a judge on speed-dial to issue a telewarrant to compel those who refuse to be tested) and often pull people over for trivial reasons and use that as an excuse to test drivers, and the initial effectiveness of RBT in Australia seems to decay over time to the level of effectiveness demonstrated by American-style sobriety checkpoints and/or roving patrols.  Additionally, driver's licenses are harder to get and easier to lose over there than in the USA, and the road test there is significantly more difficult as well.  Alcohol excise taxes are also higher in Australia as well.  But the biggest and most salient difference is the seriousness with which they take the issue of drunk driving.  You really do NOT want to get busted for DUI in the Land Down Under!

Of course, the picture down under is not entirely rosy.  Australia's drinking culture is quite extreme even by American, Canadian, and British standards (though tame by New Zealand standards), and binge drinking is quite the art form over there.  Indeed, even the aforementioned study found that while traffic deaths and injuries do not increase discontinuously at 18 when they become legal to drink, there is still a discontinuous increase in hospital visits and admissions for alcohol poisoning and injuries from assault at 18.  But the fact that, even in a country with a more Anglo-Celtic, drink-to-get-drunk culture than the USA, it is nonetheless possible to break the link between drinking and drunk driving casualties, really speaks volumes indeed.

In other words, lowering the drinking age in the USA should really not be something to fear.  But we also need to get tougher on drunk driving if we wish to continue the progress of decades past.

If it Ducks Like a Quack

After celebrating our recent victory in New Zealand, we almost forgot about the other country down under.  While there does not appear to be any real serious chance of Australia's drinking age being raised, the head of the Australian Medical Association just revealed himself as the king of quacks by calling for his country's drinking age to be raised to not 21, but 25.   Dr. Steve Hambleton claims that the brain continues to develop until age 25, and that exposure to alcohol before that age can change a person's addictive potential.   He also claims that raising the age limit would reduce drunken violence, which is apparently a serious problem in Australia.

But once again, theory collides pretty hard with reality.  First of all, the most recent studies have found that brain development (especially the prefrontal cortex) actually continues well into the 30s and 40s, and possibly even beyond that.  Secondly, as for the risk of alcoholism, the best study we have found that addresses the issue, Agrawal et al. (2009), finds that drinking before 18 (and especially before 15) does appear to increase the risk of later alcoholism, but there was no significant difference between those who began drinking at 18, 19, 20, 21, or even 23+.  So 21 or even 25 is completely arbitrary.  Thirdly, some states of India have a drinking age of 25 while others are 18 or 21 and a few are "dry" for all ages, and there is currently no evidence that the parts with higher drinking ages have fewer drinking problems than the parts with lower drinking ages.  In fact, the parts with an age limit of 25 find it VERY hard to enforce, with up to 90% of bar patrons on a busy night being "underage."  How Australia could possibly pull it off remains an unanswered question.  Finally, setting the drinking age seven years higher than the age of majority is serious violation of the civil rights of 18-24 year old legal adults, unless of course Dr. Hambleton is willing to raise the age of majority for everything else (good and bad) to 25 as well.  Which we think is unlikely, by the way.

If Australia really wants to solve its legendary drinking problem, which is almost as bad as New Zealand's and affects ALL ages, they would be better off keeping the drinking age at 18 and enforcing it better while raising the alcohol taxes, setting a price floor, reducing the number and density of alcohol outlets, improving alcohol education and treatment, and most importantly, cracking down VERY hard on DUI and especially drunk violence and disorderly conduct.  Australia has seen great success in reducing drunk driving fatalities, but drunk violence and extreme binge drinking remain serious problems.  It is mainly a cultural problem, which can really only be solved by changing the culture.  And raising the drinking age will NOT accomplish any beneficial culture change--in fact it will most likely make it worse, if the USA is any indication.

Before You Go Out Drinking--Watch This:

Here is a great Australian video everyone should watch about the dangers of driving under the influence, regardless of age.  It just might make you think twice before taking such a risk.  (Warning--contains some graphic images)



Moral of the story:  Drunk driving is like Russian roulette, and you never know who will be hit with the proverbial bullet when you play.  In fact it's worse because it all too often kills innocent people who aren't playing that stupid game.  It's actually very simple to avoid:  if you plan to drive, don't drink, and if you plan to drink, don't drive.  Thus, there is no excuse.

ARRIVE ALIVE, DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE!!!

Australia Revisited

Every once in a while, it seems that a vocal minority of Australians want to raise their country's drinking age (currently 18) to 21.  Recently, this issue has been revisited due to the nation's notorious drinking problem, in a land where binge drinking is an art form among all ages.  But many Australians are not at all convinced that raising the drinking age will solve anything. 

A case in point is the New South Wales Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, who originally suggested that the drinking age should be raised but is now against the idea.  He knows that it would not fix anything, and that the real problems have other solutions.  For example, Professor Sandra Jones (University of Wollongong) notes that raising the prices of alcohol (i.e. through taxes and/or a price floor), reducing overall availability, and reducing advertising would all go a long way to reducing Australia's drinking problem, citing the nation's experience with cigarettes.  But more fundamentally, the problem is largely a cultural one that raising the drinking age simply won't do jack to fix.  And all they have to do to is come to America to see what we mean.

For more info about Australia's drinking age debate, see our previous post about this issue.

Will Australia Raise the Drinking Age?

NOTE: This blog is primarily about the United States and is thus written from an American perspective.


Just as more and more Americans want the drinking age to be lowered to 18 over here, there is a growing movement to raise the Australian drinking age (currently 18) to 19 or even 21. The movement, which appears to be spearheaded by Prof. Ian Hickey, cites hackneyed and specious claims about "dain bramage" and alcohol-related violence. Interestingly, drunk driving in Australia is barely even mentioned at all since it is less of a problem over there than here (they are much tougher on DUI than America is), and we can really learn a lot from them. Fortunately, the government is not interested in raising the drinking age, and thus it probably won't happen. Because if it did, it would merely throw gasoline on the fire.

If they want to see what a failure the 21 drinking age is, they should come to America. We tried raising the drinking age to 19 in the early 1980s. Didn't work, so we raised it to 21 in the mid 1980s. Still didn't work. Then we added all these ancillary laws such as dram shop, social host, use and lose, zero tolerance, internal possession. And we toughened up enforcement. Guess what? It still doesn't work.

If Australia is worried about kids under 18 getting wasted, they should enforce the current drinking age better. And the biggest problem group over there, like in America, is people in their twenties. Raising the drinking age targets the wrong group. It would be best for them to raise the alcohol taxes (and make them proportional to alcohol content), shorten pub sales hours (currently 24/7), increase alcohol education, and have zero tolerance for drunk violence. Being drunk is no excuse for misbehavior--millions of people get drunk without ever becoming violent. And forcing drinking underground (where it can't be monitored) is unlikely to reduce violence in any sense. Even if it somehow did for 18-20 year olds, which is unproven, it would merely shift the behavior to 21-24 year olds (which already have a problem).

As for brain damage, there is no conclusive evidence that drinking at 18 is significantly worse than doing so at 21, all else being equal. Maybe for those younger than 18, but that's already illegal. So let's not confuse the issue. Again, lack of enforcement (in Australia) is the problem. And many young people would likely benefit from education about alcohol, which needs to start young since drinking starts young over there (and here as well).

Yes, Virginia, Australia DOES have a drinking problem, and a legendary one at that.  But America does too.  In fact, all predominantly Anglo-Celtic cultures do to some extent.   That's not news.  With few exceptions, the more Anglo-Celtic they are, the worse the drinking culture.  Ditto for pub/street violence--they don't call it a Glasgow kiss for nothing.

How Anglo-Celtic is each country? (Figures are approximate)

US:  30%
Canada:  50%
Australia: 70%
New Zealand: 70%+
UK: 86%
Republic of Ireland: 95%

Due to changing demographics, America is less Anglo-Celtic now than in the past.  This perhaps explains the decline in drinking since 1980 more than anything else, and it is less true for Australia and other such cultures.

The drinking age is irrelevant.  Drunken violence (and other problems) flourishes in cultures that tolerates misbehavior when drunk, such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and of course the USA.  Alcohol must never be considered an excuse.