To Puerto Rico: Don't Raise the Drinking Age!

There has been a recent proposal in Puerto Rico to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21.  If it passes, it would leave only the Virgin Islands as the last remaining holdout where the drinking age is 18, since Guam raised it to 21 in 2010 (much to our chagrin).  Aside from the tired old canards about "safety" and "protecting young people" (from themselves), there is also that pesky 10% highway funding penalty that Puerto Rico has had to deal with every year since 1988, and their flagging economy can clearly use a boost.  And this was not the first time such a hike in the drinking age was proposed:  in the 1990s, there were two failed attempts to raise the drinking age to 21, which most of the people did not support.

While we believe that such a law is unlikely to pass, Twenty-One Debunked would still like to urge the island to avoid making the same mistakes as the mainland.  That is, Puerto Rico should keep the drinking age at 18, while strengthening and enforcing it better.  To do so, they should:

• Increase retailer compliance checks to help keep booze out of the hands of people under 18.
• Increase the penalties for selling or furnishing alcohol to people under 18.
• Increase alcohol education programs in schools and elsewhere.
• Bring back the successful community coalitions formed in the 1990s to fight underage drinking and other alcohol problems.
• Crack down harder on drunk driving, drunk violence, and drunk and disorderly conduct among all ages.
• To reduce traffic deaths and other alcohol-related problems, and raise much-needed revenue at the same time, raise the alcohol taxes (especially beer) and the gas tax.
• Above all, never back down.

Puerto Rico has already seen great success in reducing underage drinking and traffic deaths since the 1980s, and they did so without raising the drinking age one iota.  They should continue to build on the successes of the past in order to have a better future.  And it is completely unnecessary to violate anyone's civil rights to do so.

Extreme Binge Drinking Revisited

The latest news on extreme binge drinking is in.  Apparently, a new study of Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey data from 2005-2011 found that about one in ten high school seniors have engaged in "extreme" drinking, defined as 10 or more drinks in the same occasion at least once in the past two weeks.  And about one in twenty have consumed 15+ drinks (!) in the same timeframe.  Rates were highest in the Midwest and in rural areas (i.e. so-called "blue-collar America"), and more common among males than females.  We have already noted similar findings four years ago.

While clearly only a small minority in engaging in such truly dangerous drinking, it is not a trivial fraction either, and is probably an underestimate.  And, most relevant to the drinking age debate, these numbers have not changed significantly since MTF began following them in 2005, despite ever-intensifying enforcement of the 21 drinking age and its ancillary laws.  So recent declines in prevalence of 5+ drinks in a row appear to be somewhat misleading, especially since underage drinkers tend to undercount their drinks.  Lying (or exaggerating or minimizing) is also fairly common in teen drug and alcohol surveys.

For what it's worth, according to the same surveys about 25% of seniors and 18% of sophomores admit to having had 5+ in a row in the past two weeks, and these numbers are leveling off after a decade-and-a-half-long decline.  It seems that fewer teens are drinking, but the more they do when they do.  That may explain why in emergency rooms in several cities across the country, admissions related to teen binge drinking increased in recent years in spite of surveys showing that teen drinking and "binge" drinking are both at record lows.

Tracking this highly dangerous behavior is long overdue.  We already know that among college freshmen, 20% of males and 8% of females have done extreme drinking (10+ males, 8+ females) in the past two weeks.  But that was a one-semester snapshot in the fall of 2003, with no other years for comparison.  The rate of "binge" drinking (using the 5/4 definition) in the past two weeks was 41% for males and 34% for females, which does jibe well with known statistics (roughly 40%) that use that definition.  But one must wonder if there is even any relationship at all between the rates of drinking, "binge" drinking, and "extreme" drinking.  And it is an important distinction to draw, as studies show that a higher cutoff (e.g. 7/6 or 8/6) has better predictive value for the more serious alcohol-related problems than the rather unscientific 5/4 definition.

Indeed, from 1993 to 2005, the percentage of college students who "binge" drank (5/4 definition) in the past two weeks has not changed a whole lot, but the percentage who do so three more times in the past two weeks ("frequent binging") has gone up significantly.  And since the aforementioned study found that extreme drinking was strongly correlated with frequent "binging," the former most likely rose as well.  Further evidence comes from another study that found that the number of alcohol poisoning deaths (a good indicator of truly dangerous drinking) among college students nearly tripled from 1998 to 2005. 

Bottom line:  when you criminalize normative drinking, you inevitably normalize truly dangerous drinking.  We saw the same thing during Prohibition.  And we all pay a heavy price for it.

That Really Explains A Lot

An Alternet article titled "The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever", along with the related Grist article, "Science Confirms:  Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math", sheds a great deal of light on why it is so hard to get people to accept the truth when it conflicts with their political views.  A recent study found that our political passions can easily (and unfortunately) undermine our most basic reasoning skills.  That is, no matter how good one is at math, one may get the answer to a math problem wrong if the right answer contradicts their political beliefs.  Worse, when people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct such errors only makes them cling to their erroneous beliefs even more.  And this is true no matter how smart someone is--in fact political passion appeared to trump reason even more so for those who were better at math!  A truly depressing discovery indeed.

All this explains why our movement in particular has had such a hard time convincing the opposition about the error of their ways.  For an issue as fraught and passionate as the drinking age, it seems that for many of our opponents, no amount of evidence is enough to convince them that their unscientific and pseudo-scientific positions really don't stand up to scrutiny.   A particular debate that our group's leader had with an otherwise intelligent and well-educated member of the pro-21 crowd (with a PhD no less!) comes to mind.  The opponent's "evidence" and faulty logic were refuted over and over again by citing the best studies on the matter, and yet he still refused to budge one bit, finding every conceivable reason to believe that our data were suspect.  This literally went on for weeks.  But eventually he just got tired of arguing and walked away with his proverbial tail between his legs, after which we proudly declared victory.

In other words, we really do have our work cut out for us, and more so than we ever thought.

Rotten Reporting Strikes Again

A new Canadian study using data from 1997-2007 finds that there is a significant jump in hospital admissions for alcohol poisoning, suicide, and unintentional injuries during the first year that young Canadians reach the legal drinking age (18 or 19 depending on the province).  The way the study has been reported in the media implied that raising the drinking age would lead to a reduction in such morbidity.   Thus, if the three provinces with a drinking age of 18 were to raise it to 19, there would supposedly be fewer alcohol-related injuries overall in Canada.

However, this faulty logic ignores the fact that the same spike in hospitalizations still occurred in provinces where the drinking age is 19, just delayed by one year.  The study does not provide any evidence of a net reduction in injuries from a higher age limit, just a delay.  Apparently, the first year that one becomes legal to drink is the riskiest year regardless of the drinking age, which Twenty-One Debunked has noted from previous American studies such as Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), Males (1986), and Dirscherl (2011).  Thus, raising the legal drinking age is merely a shell game that is unlikely to actually solve anything. 

Rather than merely postpone the inevitable, it would be far better if all Canadian provinces (and the USA) were to lower the drinking age to 18, increase alcohol education and treatment, and crack down harder on DUI and drunk violence among all ages.  For the USA, whose alcohol taxes are well below those found in Canada and other nations, it would likely be beneficial to raise such taxes as well.

Senator Frank Lautenberg Has Passed Away

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg passed away on June 3 at the age of 89.  The late senator, who has been in office for five terms, was the man who wrote the National Minimum Drinking Age Act that coerced states to raise the drinking age to 21 nearly three decades ago.  However, we should also remember all the good he has done for nearly every progressive cause in this country since then, and it was unfortunate that he was on the wrong side of history as far as the drinking age is concerned.   A longtime liberal icon and a decent man overall, may he rest in peace.

The idea of raising the drinking age to 21 nationwide actually originated with MADD, especially its founder Candy Lightner.  New Jersey's so-called "blood border" with New York would have better been solved (and prevented entirely) if New Jersey simply kept its drinking age at 18 rather than raise it to 21 and have the feds coerce New York to raise it as well.   And the Canadian experience shows that drunk driving deaths still would have declined as fast if not faster.  The idea that the 21 drinking age saved 25,000 lives (or any lives for that matter in the long run) has been debunked as a statistical mirage by Miron and Tetelbaum (2009).  Had it not been for MADD and the moral panic over "teen drinking" at the time, Lautenberg probably would have opted for the smarter choice and rejected an unenforceably high drinking age of 21.  As for Lightner, who still supports the 21 drinking age so much that she went on national TV in 2008 and insulted our men and women in uniform just to make a point, may her name and memory be forever blotted out.

What Should the BAC Limit Be?

Recently there has been a push to lower the BAC limit for DUI to 0.05 from its current 0.08.  The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) estimates that it would save 1000 lives per year.  This idea is not without controversy, and Twenty-One Debunked is clearly no stranger to controversy.  So is it a wise idea?

First, let's examine the evidence.  It is clear that most drivers are significantly impaired at a BAC of 0.05-0.08, with at least a fourfold increase in fatal crash risk compared to zero BAC, even though this impairment can be rather subtle.  For young male drivers, this relative risk increases to tenfold.  Most civilized countries (and the state of New York) recognize this fact and have thus set their BAC limits at 0.05, and some have set it even lower still.  And doing so has been shown to save lives, even in car-cultures like Australia who saw more progress in reducing alcohol-related traffic deaths than the USA or Canada.  To reach a BAC of 0.05, it would take about three drinks for a 180-pound man or about two drinks for a 120-pound woman within an hour or two.  So contrary to popular opinion, a 0.05 limit would NOT criminalize having a drink with dinner at a restaurant and subsequently driving home.  Thus, on balance, the benefits of lowering the limit outweigh the costs, and it is most likely a good idea overall.

That being said, Twenty-One Debunked does NOT support making it a criminal offense to drive with a BAC of 0.05-0.08.  Rather, we favor the approach taken by the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, as well as some Australian states.  In these jurisdictions, driving with a BAC of 0.05-0.08 is illegal but is only a traffic infraction, with administrative rather than criminal penalties.  Only above 0.08 would a driver face criminal penalties.  Administrative penalties include immediate short-term license suspension, short-term vehicle impoundment, and fairly modest fines for those who fail or refuse a breathalyzer.  Our proposal already includes these ideas, along with tougher enforcement and graduated penalties based on BAC and number of offenses.  We believe that if all or even some of the ideas in our proposal were implemented, alcohol-related traffic deaths and other problems would decrease dramatically in a fairly short time.

Finally, we should note that MADD founder (and later turncoat) Candy Lightner is against lowering the BAC limit to 0.05, about as strongly as she supports keeping the drinking age 21.  Remember that in 2008 she even insulted our men and women in uniform on national TV just to make a point about why the drinking age should be 21 in her view.  That is truly the height of hubris and hypocrisy, and you don't get much more pharisaical than that.   And ironically even MADD itself, who Lightner has apparently made peace with, isn't too keen on the 0.05 limit either. 

MADD and their ilk have historically claimed that if a particular policy saves even one life, it's worth it.  Funny how they would oppose (or at least not push for) a policy that would likely save at least as many lives as their own (bogus) estimate of lives saved by the 21 drinking age.  That really speaks volumes about what they really are--an anti-youth hate group that really has no place in a civilized society but on the trash heap of history.

Lowering NZ Drinking Age to 18 Not a Disaster After All

According to a new study, it turns out that New Zealand's lowering of the drinking age from 20 to 18 in 1999 had essentially no impact on the drinking behaviors of young people, contrary to what some people have claimed.  By studying a combination of survey data, hospital admissions, and road crashes, researchers found little to no change for 15-19 year olds relative to 22-23 year olds between 1996 and 2007.  Although there was a short-term spike in alcohol-related hospital admissions (involving a small number of individuals) immediately after the law change, the overall impact of the law change was found to be minimal.  Food for thought.

This was not the only study that found little to no effect of the drinking age change.  Last year, when NZ was debating whether or not to raise the drinking age (which they ended up keeping at 18), another study came to a similar conclusion about the drinking behaviors of young people.  And contrary to what the fearmongers have been claiming, teen drinking has actually declined in recent years.  So it looks like the wowsers were wrong, at least about the drinking age.  But don't expect MADD and their ilk to agree with these studies.

To NYC: Don't Raise the Smoking Age

You are probably wondering and scratching your head as to why Twenty-One Debunked, an organization founded for the purpose of lowering the drinking age to 18, would care even one iota about tobacco policy and the rights of smokers.  After all, we have repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of banning 18-20 year old legal adults from drinking alcohol while simultaneously allowing them to (among other things) consume a far more toxic substance.  However, the answer is contained in the question itself--for many of the same reasons that the drinking age should lowered to 18, so should the smoking age remain 18.

New York City is currently proposing to raise the age limit for purchasing tobacco from 18 to 21, and Mayor Bloomberg is now in favor of such a change despite originally being against it.  If it passes, NYC would join two other towns (in Massachusetts) and the nation of Sri Lanka as the few places in the entire world where no one under 21 is allowed to buy cigarettes.  Proponents claim that it would dramatically reduce smoking rates among young people:  one study estimates that raising the age limit to 21 would reduce smoking among 18-20 year olds by 55% and among 14-17 year olds by nearly two-thirds within seven years, and that in turn would lead to lower rates of adult smoking over the long run, thereby saving countless lives and improving public health. 

However, there are good reasons to doubt the results of the study.  First of all, the study is purely theoretical without any empirical data on places that have actually raised the age limit to 21 in real life.  Secondly, one need look no further than the drinking age to see that such impressive results would be highly unlikely.  For example, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) found that, after adjustment for confounders, raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 merely reduced self-reported past-month drinking among high school seniors by five percentage points and self-reported "binge" drinking by three percentage points.  Using 1980 as a base year, when the rates of these behaviors were 70% and 40%, respectively, these numbers represent declines of roughly 7%, far less than what the above study claims would happen for smoking and small enough to be mostly or even entirely due to reporting bias.  And the NSDUH found that the average age of onset of drinking actually dropped from 16.6 to 16.2 between 1980 and 2002.  If that's "success," we'd hate to see what failure looks like.

Thus, it is far from obvious that raising the age limit for tobacco would yield any substantive public health benefits.  The most likely result would be the creation of even more technical criminals, and the expansion of the city's existing black market for untaxed/low-tax/counterfeit/stolen cigarettes and fake IDs, with the primary beneficiaries being organized crime syndicates and even terrorists.  Further erosion of respect for the law would occur as well, along with possible riots.  And why the sudden desire to raise the age limit now?  Cigarette use among young people is now at a record low in both NYC and the rest of the nation, and the massive decline in youth smoking since the 1970s occurred without raising the smoking age.  If NYC is so gung-ho about further reducing smoking among the mere 8.5% of its high school students who are still foolish enough to smoke, perhaps they should better enforce existing laws before they even think of passing new ones.

More fundamentally, raising the smoking age to 21 would be (like the 21 drinking age) a serious violation of the civil rights of 18-20 year olds, who are legal adults in virtually all other aspects of life.  It is also yet another blow to everyone's freedom from the hectoring "public health" fascism of the creeping nanny state that Mayor Bloomberg exemplifies.  Both Twenty-One Debunked and the True Spirit of America Party believe that, while smoking is a stupid and filthy habit that we strongly discourage, the fact remains that 18-20 year olds are adults and if they want to choose pleasure over longevity that should be their choice, not the government's.  We believe that, in a free society, all adults should be free to do as they please as long as they do not harm or endanger nonconsenting others more than the minimum, Darwin Awards notwithstanding.  And before anyone brings out the tired, old canard about "social costs", remember the studies show that smokers actually save society money (on balance) by dying earlier than nonsmokers, and thus they more than pay their way as far as taxes go, even in many of the low-tax states.  (Unfortunately, one cannot say the same for drinkers, but that can be solved by simply raising the tax on alcoholic beverages.)  Thus, Twenty-One Debunked simply cannot tolerate raising the smoking age to any age higher than the age of majority, even if it did improve public health.

The answer is clear.  Old enough to fight and vote = old enough to drink and smoke.  'Nuff said.

Wasted in Wisconsin

It seems that the state that the irreverent 1999 comedy film Dogma referred to as being "worse than hell" has a pretty bad drinking problem, according to a new report.  Wisconsin is apparently significantly worse than the national average in terms of "binge" drinking (#1 in the nation), heavy drinking, drunk driving, and overall alcohol-related costs to society.  The intensity of binge drinking is also the highest in the nation, averaging a whopping 9 drinks (!) per session.  And it should come as no surprise when we consider the things that set Wisconsin apart from most other states.

Wisconsin has the most lenient DUI laws in the nation (e.g. first offense is only a traffic infraction), one of the lowest beer taxes in the nation (2 cents/gallon), several major breweries, long and cold winters, and one of the most pervasive and ingrained drinking cultures in the nation.  Partying hard is almost like a religion in the Badger State, and not just among young people.  And this has been true for most (if not all) of the state's history.

While we do not dispute that the state has a serious problem with excessive drinking, and agree with some of their recommendations, we at Twenty-One Debunked do take exception to the report authors' strident pro-21 stance.  When Wisconsin raised the drinking age to 21 in the 1980s, it did not seem to solve anything, mainly because it failed to change the underlying drinking culture significantly.   If anything, the 21 drinking age likely makes things worse in the long run.  It would make far more sense to lower the drinking age back to 18, while also improving alcohol education, raising the beer tax, and toughening laws against drunk driving.  Only then would it be possible to create a more responsible drinking culture than the one they have now.  Of course, changing the culture will not be particularly easy, but it nonetheless can and should be done.  And Wisconsin would probably be the best place to start changing America's overall drinking culture.

Things Underage Drinkers Didn't Do (Part Six)

It's been a while since we posted a "Things Underage Drinkers Didn't Do" post, and after one of the biggest drinking days of the year, we felt that it was time to post a new one.

In the past few weeks or so:

An underage drinker did NOT kill his 9 year old nephew in a drunk driving crash.

An underage drinker did NOT rear-end a police car while driving drunk.

An underage drinker did NOT drunkenly crash into a gas pump, causing it to burst into flames and injuring her passenger.

An underage drinker did NOT drunkenly crash his semi-truck into another person's car (and injuring her) after driving the wrong way.

An underage drinker did NOT injure a police officer and two children in a drunk driving crash.

An underage drinker did NOT run over and pin a pedestrian after drunkenly crashing into several cars and a stop sign--all in the same night.

An underage drinker did NOT drunkenly crash into both a restaurant's fence AND a the front porch of a nearby house in the same night.

An underage drinker did NOT wrap her car around a telephone pole with a BAC of 0.223, breaking the pole in half, and then try to flee the scene--and this was her second DUI offense.  (Some people never learn)

An underage drinker did NOT drunkenly crash into two cars and a group of pedestrians while speeding, injuring five people and putting one in critical condition.

An underage drinker did not throw such a drunken fit in public that they needed 10-12 cop cars to come and arrest her for disorderly conduct.  All because the bartender wouldn't serve her anymore.

The cop that killed two people while speeding and driving with a BAC of double the legal limit was clearly over 21, since they generally don't allow anyone under 21 to become police officers.

An underage drinker did NOT have the chutzpah to sue his friend and Applebees for serving him the alcohol he drank on the night he drunkenly crashed into and killed two teenage girls.  (Another repeat offender, by the way)

And that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg.