We know you want to join the 21 Club and raise your drinking age to 21, in the hopes that it will reduce your legendary drinking problem. But 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. Think about that.
So what should you do to reduce your legendary drinking problem? Well, for starters:
- 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.
- 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 last but not least, before you even consider raising the drinking age, how about actually enforcing the 18 drinking age you have now? 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 to raising the drinking age. And raising the drinking age can actually work at cross-purposes with the alternatives discussed above. Take it from us, you will one day regret doing so. Honestly, the best advice we can give you is "don't be like us".
Seriously.
Seriously.
