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with just about every possible alcohol policy under the sun) doing something similar before 1977 when it was rescinded.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

Post #21--Would a Split Drinking Age Be Better?

A new study of the drinking age (Males, 2008) apparently finds that a split (or "graduated") drinking age of 18 for beer/wine and 21 for liquor would reduce combined violent deaths (traffic crash deaths plus homicides) among 18-20 year olds with similar reductions for 16-17 year olds and 21-24 year olds. It studied the effects over time of raising the age to 21 in the 1980s, based on a state's former drinking age (18 for all beverages, 18 for beer/wine only, or 19 and 20), relative to states that were 21 throughout. When they were raised to 21, the ones that were previously 18 for all beverages, as well as the former 19 and 20 states, saw a decrease in combined deaths, mainly from traffic crashes. But the 11 states that were 18 for beer and/or wine only, they saw an increase in deaths, with the lion's share of the increase being homicides. Interestingly, a few states that were 18 for all beverages saw increases or no significant change as well when the ages were raised to 21.

What are we to make of all this? Several states had split drinking ages, many of which had them for decades. When we look at the dates that the 21 law became effective, we see that all of them but Oklahoma (1983) raised them in 1985 or later. Ditto for the "18 for all beverages" states that saw increases or no significant changes. Hmmmm....what happened around that time? In 1984, the federal government coerced the states with lower drinking ages to raise them to 21 or lose 10% of annual highway funding starting in 1988. So, it could simply be that for many of the coerced states, raising their drinking ages merely threw gasoline on the fire!

This interpretation, rather than anything special about a split drinking age, appears to be more likely to be true when we consider a study by Miron and Tetelbaum (2009). In their study, which controlled for more variables than Males (2008) but looked only at traffic fatalities, they separated out the states based on the year the drinking age was raised to 21. The states that were coerced (i.e. those who raised the age after 1984) overall saw no lifesaving effect. On the other hand, the ones that raised their drinking ages voluntarily in 1983 or earlier did see a small lifesaving effect, but that only lasted a year or two and then wore off. Robustness checks were done as well. Interestingly, Miron and Tetelbaum found no clear relationship for the purchase ages of various beverage types when measured separately, but they did find an increase in fatalities among drivers under 18 when the drinking age was 19, 20, or 21 as opposed to 18.

We at 21 Debunked therefore see no reason why a split drinking age is superior to a drinking age of 18 across the board. We would support the former as a steppingstone to the latter, but ultimately favor the latter hands down. We never understood it since you can get just as drunk on one as you can on the other, and beer is grosslly overrepresented in DUI fatalities. If states feel that they must have special restrictions for 18-20 year olds, which are probably unnecessary, one or more of the following may make more sense:

• Keep the age at 21 for kegs, cases, and other bulk quantities of alcohol; let 18 year olds buy everything else.
• Limit the quantities 18 year olds can buy off-premise to 216 ounces of beer, 1 gallon of wine, or 1 fifth of liquor per person per day.
• Require 18-20 year olds (or even just 18 year olds) to sign a logbook upon purchase, similar to what is done for Sudafed at all ages.
• Have kegs and cases be sold only in beer distributors regardless of age, making the first two things easier to enforce.
• Keep it 21 for internet alcohol orders, like some states currently do with cigarettes.
• Have shorter trading hours (beginning later and/or ending earlier) for off-premises sales for 18 year olds than for those over 19 (or 20 or 21).
• Allow some bars to set the limit higher than 18 if they wish (no new law needs to be made).

Also, we feel that the age limit should be the same for on- and off-premise sales, at 18. If we let 18 year olds buy cigarettes and guns for off premise use, why not a 6-pack? Their younger friends will find a way to get booze either way, and both 8th graders and 10th graders currently find alcohol easier to get than cigarettes. Furthermore, if there is a wide gap between the two (i.e. 18 for bars and 21 for stores), that may perversely encourage drunk driving for those rural 18-20 year olds whose nearest bar is 10+ miles away while a store that sells 6-packs is a mere 500 feet away. However, such perverse incentives could in theory be minimized by letting 18 year olds have the same drinking rights as 21 year olds currently enjoy, with the one exception being off-premise purchase, and having that purchase age be 19 instead of 21. We don't have any studies to back this up, but we also know of no hard evidence that it is any safer than 18 across the board.

In contrast, there is some evidence that restricting bulk alcohol sales may have benefits. A study of college students in college towns by Kuo et al. (2003) found that the availability of 6-packs was negatively associated with self-reported "binge" drinking, 12-packs showed no effect, while 24-packs (cases), 30-packs, and kegs all showed significant positive associations. In other words, the more 6-packs available, the less "binge" drinking. The more cases and kegs, the more "binge" drinking. (Liquor and wine were not studied; nor were 18-packs.) They also found that beer price was inversely related to "binge" drinking, and store advertising was directly related, just as expected. While we were unable to locate any jurisdiction in the world that has age-specific bulk-only alcohol restrictions, it stands to reason that such a thing would make more sense than splitting the age by venue or beverage type regardless of quantity.