The Invisible Knapsack (Updated)

Three decades ago, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh coined the term "invisible knapsack" to refer to the subtle and not-so-subtle advantages that come with white privilege and male privilege resulting from inequality.  She describes such privilege as being "like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks".  The idea is that while we are generally taught that racism and sexism put some people (i.e. women and people of color) at a disadvantage, we are often taught to remain blissfully unaware of its corollary advantages that accrue to white males.  Hence, the "invisible knapsack" of privilege.

We at Twenty-One Debunked couldn't help but notice just how much this metaphor also relates to America's 21 drinking age and the "over-21 privilege" that results.  Being well over 21 myself, as the webmaster and founder of Twenty-One Debunked I have put together a list of advantages in the invisible knapsack of over-21 privilege that people like myself carry every day.   We have updated this list to include tobacco and cannabis as well now.  As a person over 21, as long as I have a valid ID to prove it:

1. I can buy alcoholic beverages at any store that sells them, in any quantity I wish.
2. I can do the same with tobacco and cannabis as well if I desire to do so.  I can even openly smoke both in some public places if I want to.
3. I can enter pretty much any bar or nightclub of my choosing without fearing that people of my age group cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
4. If I do not want to associate with people under 21, I may frequent numerous establishments that ban younger people from entering.
5. I can get a hotel room with relatively little difficulty as long as I can afford it, since hotels are less likely to cast aspersions on me due to my age.
6. I am never asked to speak for all of the people in my age group, nor do I have to worry about my individual behavior reflecting on my entire age group.
7. I can legally host a drinking party with my friends, as long as all the guests are over 21.
8. I can join my co-workers for happy hour after work, and even talk about it at work, without any sort of shame.
9. When I go out with people under 21, it is generally understood that one (or more) of them will be the designated driver instead of me.
10. Generally speaking, I can drink alcoholic beverages fairly openly without having to worry about getting arrested, fined, jailed, expelled, fired, having my driver's license revoked, or being publicly humiliated.  Ditto for smoking tobacco and/or cannabis as well.
11. As long as I am not driving or operating machinery, I can legally get as drunk (or stoned, or both) as I please in many states. 
12. Even in states where public drunkenness is technically illegal, the cops are unlikely to arrest me unless my behavior is really out of control.  There is no equivalent to "internal possession" laws for my age group.
13. If I do manage to get in alcohol-related trouble on campus, which is far less likely for me, I will likely face lesser penalties, and I will not have to worry about my parents being notified without my consent.
14. If I think one of my over-21 peers may have alcohol poisoning, there would be no reason for me to hesitate to call 911 for fear of the law (and vice-versa).
15. I can have a drink or two (or maybe even three!) before driving without having to worry about being over the legal limit for DUI. 
16. Even if I drive while over the limit, I can be assured that drunk drivers in my age group will NOT be the highest law enforcement priority.  I can just take the back roads and hope for the best, and know that the law enforcement statistics are largely on my side as long as it's not a major holiday or the end of the month.
17. If I choose to drive drunk, I can know that I am statistically far more likely to kill someone under 21 than the other way around.
18. Even if I had several convictions for DUI or drunken violence, I can rest assured that I will still be allowed to buy and consume alcohol as I please.
19. I enjoy less scrutiny over my own behavior, because I live in a society in which young people are scapegoated for adult problems.
20. I do not have to worry about being a good role model when it comes to drinking, since people under 21 can be punished (often severely) for emulating me.
21. To really top it off, I have an easier time getting my hands on semiautomatic assault rifles and dangerous weapons in general, especially handguns.  In fact, in some states, I can even carry concealed weapons in a bar!
22. Finally, I have a much better chance of being taken seriously on the issue of lowering the drinking age, or any other age limit for that matter, without being knee-jerkedly accused of selfishness or immaturity.

And the list goes on.  As we see, the 21 drinking age is not just about disadvantaging people under 21, but giving unearned advantages to people over 21 as well.  And while some of these advantages are positive rights that should be extended to everyone (or at least all adults over 18), others are not "rights" at all, but wrongs that are an unfortunate byproduct of setting arbitrary age limits and of adultism in general.  Still others could be considered either rights or wrongs depending on the context.  And let's not forget the luxury of being able to blissfully ignore the issue entirely.

So, are the advantages found in this invisible knapsack really worth it?  Many people over 21 would say yes, but upon closer examination these advantages actually come at a hefty price, even for people over 21.  Just think about social host liability laws, other annoying ancillary laws, ubiquitous ID checks, millions of tax dollars wasted on enforcement, loss of social cohesion, karma, and highly dubious legal precedent that can be used to make our supposedly free country even more of a police state via turnkey tyranny.  In fact, the only people over 21 who, on balance, really benefit from the status quo are the ones who least deserve to benefit--those who drive drunk or otherwise behave irresponsibly when it comes to alcohol, as well as those parents who would rather stick their heads in the sand than teach their kids how to drink responsibly.

Do you hear that?  That's (hopefully) the sound of the pro-21 crowd throwing up all of the proverbial Kool-Aid that they drank long ago.

Americans Are Still Drowning In The Bottom Of The Bottle

And the pandemic, or more accurately, the lockdowns and isolation (antisocial distancing) imposed on Americans, was only gasoline on the already-raging fire.  The USA was in fact the only major country to see a net increase in overall alcohol consumption during the pandemic, and one of only a few countries to see an increase in alcohol-related deaths as well, especially among prime working-age adults.  After decades of the failed social experiment of the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age, we are now seeing a clear divergence from the rest of the world (and not in a good way!) among the generations who came of age since then.

Of course, the neo-temperance crowd as well as the ageists (is there really any other kind these days?) would counter that this only proves that Americans can't handle their alcohol, so therefore lowering the drinking age to 18 would be even worse.  But what they are tacitly admitting by saying this specious argument is that Americans are inferior to Europeans--do they really want to concede that?  Didn't think so.  And by that same logic, they might as well call for bringing back Prohibition for all ages, as that would be the ultimate logical conclusion of that utterly patronizing and paternalistic argument.  

Besides, we know now that, while all policy measures have their hard limits, the most time-tested, efficient, effective, and cost-effective one of all is to simply raise the price of alcohol, generally via taxation.  Wayland Ellis has pointed that out several times, and it is the one thing that he and the polar-opposite Philip N. Cook can agree upon.  The late Mark Kleiman also made a similar argument years ago.  Alcohol taxes and prices have been lagging behind inflation for decades in the USA, so therefore the lowest-hanging fruit to make headway against America's growing drinking problem is to raise such taxes.  In fact, if set high enough, practically no other alcohol regulations or restrictions are needed at all.  

Another promising idea, would be similar to what parts of the Northern Territory of Australia, as well as parts of Western Australia, currently have:  something called the Banned Drinker Register (BDR).  It is exactly what it sounds like, and targets actual problem drinkers individually only, with no collateral damage to non-problem drinkers.  This can also be paired with something like South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Program for those convicted of drunk driving, drunk violence, drunk vandalism, or repeated disorderly conduct violations.  In addition, problem drinkers can also have themselves voluntarily added to the blacklist for a fixed period of time, much like problem gamblers are currently allowed to do. (Call it "86 Me" or something like that.)  Mark Kleiman would certainly have approved of that as well.  And aside from the downside of ID checking of all buyers that would be required to enforce the BDR (not radically different from the status quo), it is actually the most libertarian policy that there is.  Libertarian purists, of course, would probably only support the South Dakota style 24/7 program and the voluntary blacklist, and that would be fine with Twenty-One Debunked either way.

And of course, let America be America again, and lower the drinking age to 18.  If you're old enough to go to war, you're old enough to go to the bar.  'Nuff said.

Is There A "Laffer Curve" Effect for Alcohol Taxes/Prices Versus Alcohol-Related Harms?

The famous (and controversial) Laffer Curve, sometimes called the Laffer-Khaldun Curve, posits that raising taxes beyond a certain point will decrease revenue rather than increase it.  Would such a relationship also hold for alcohol, not only for revenue, but for alcohol-related harms as well?  

Twenty-One Debunked has repeatedly noted that previous studies have generally found a reasonably strong inverse relationship between alcohol prices/taxes and alcohol-related harms.  That is probably the only thing that both Philip N. Cook and Wayland Ellis would agree upon, which really says something as they are on polar opposite ends to the alcohol regulation spectrum in general, and in particular the issue of the 21 drinking age.  

But does there ever reach a point beyond which this relationship breaks down and ceases to be true, or even reverses?  The recent experience of Scotland seems to suggest as much.  As British libertarian author and blogger Christopher Snowdon (no relation to the Wikileaks guy) notes in his blog, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, a recent study found that Scotland's minimum unit pricing (MUP) scheme did NOT work as intended.  This mandated price floor of 50 pence per British standard unit of alcohol (about $1 per standard Amercian drink at the time, before the sterling crumbled recently) failed to meaningfully reduce alcohol consumption, particularly among the heaviest drinkers.  In fact, some population subgroups even saw increases in consumption.  And there was no effect on alcohol-related ER visits or crime either.  And it didn't even help the beleaguered pub industry either as promised.  Oops!

That's some pretty weak sauce if you ask us!

(And apparently not just Scotland, but also in Ireland has now implemented MUP as well.)

One study concluded at the end of 2018, long before the pandemic and lockdowns of course, and the other concluded in January 2020.  But what happened in the UK as a result of the lockdown-induced reduction in alcohol availability and marketing?  After all, as Joseph Califano of CASA famously said, "availability is the mother of abuse", so alcohol abuse and problems should have plummeted, right?  WRONG.  Snowdon notes that while overall alcohol consumption declined in the UK, the number of alcohol-specfic deaths actually increased.  Apparently, the average level of drinking in a population does not determine the extent of heavy drinking, it's the other way around.  And this natural experiment proves it more elegantly than any other study in history, and that also explains partly why MUP in Scotland failed to have the desired and predicted effects on the heaviest drinkers, who are apparently less sensitive to price and availability than the general population.

After all, the determinants of heavy drinking, and especially alcohol dependence, are likely quite different than those of drinking in general, and price is clearly one of the much lesser factors in their behavior.  And given the outsized impact on population health being driven by such a small minority of heavy drinkers, targeting the entire population so bluntly is unlikely to improve overall population health by very much if at all.

That's not to say that alcohol that is extremely cheap in a relative sense by historical and international standards, such as in the USA today, doesn't still generate some problems that respond to modest tax/price hikes at all.  That is probably still true, noting that America was the only major country in the world to see a net increase in overall alcohol consumption during lockdowns (to say nothing of the heaviest end of the drinking scale, let that sink in).  In the UK, even prior to the Scottish MUP scheme as well as during, it should be noted that nationwide alcohol taxes were already quite high and outpacing inflation for a while, and as of 2014 it was already prohibited to sell alcohol "below cost" in stores nationwide.  Thus further price hikes on the lower-end beverages may have had a more limited marginal effect and pushed the total prices to the wrong side of a Laffer-esque curve.  But we do know now that the overly simplistic models of the neo-temperance lobby leave a lot to be desired, to put it mildly.  The "whole population approach" clearly has some very hard limits.

After all, drinking per se is not the problem, excessive drinking (and the outrageous behavior that often goes with it) is the real problem.  And the 95th percentile of drinkers (top 5% of drinkers) seems to be quite inelastic (i.e. insensitive) to price.  Cart, meet horse.

The upshot:  while Twenty-One Debunked still supports raising alcohol taxes in the USA, within reason, we note that the effects are far more nuanced than we once thought, and often quite tenuous. 

UPDATE:  Apparently, alcohol-related deaths did drop by 10% in the first full year after MUP was implemented in Scotland, to the lowest level since 2013.  Another study found a 13% drop in alcohol-related deaths.  But in light of the other lackluster findings above, the actual causality of this correlation remains unclear for the time being.  Only time will tell if there are any long-term benefits to this policy, which is set to sunset in 2024, six years after it was first implemented in May 2018.  MUP does seem to be effective in Canada and Northern Territory, Australia. 

Also, another nuance that gets glossed over is that while alcohol taxes are now relatively high on beer, wine, and spirits in the UK, they are still quite low for cider.  Thus, MUP had the largest effect on the prices of cheap, high-strength ciders, many of which are "ciders" in name only due to a legal loophole.

And back to the topic of lockdowns, did you know that in 2020, for 13-18 year olds, the number of drug/alcohol deaths actually DOUBLED compared to the average of the several years leading up to it?   Lockdowns are clearly NOT benign for children or young people at all, and the next person to say "kids are resilient" can go take a long walk off a short pier!

(Corrections were made to some of the dates in the article above.)

How Cannabis Legalization Should Have Gone, And Still Can If We Want To

The TSAP and Twenty-One Debunked have both long supported full cannabis legalization for everyone over 18, period.  And we took what we could get thus far towards that goal, even with all the compromises that had to be made along the way (especially that utterly abominable 21 age limit unique to the USA and Quebec). And no, legalization is still NOT a disaster.  

But the status quo leaves much to be desired, and surely we can aim higher.  How has it disappointed?  Let us count the ways:

• First of all, the age limit is still 21, not 18 like it should be by now (and really should have always been).
• Limits on self-cultivation are far too tight, if it is even allowed at all.
• Taxes, licensing fees, and licensing restrictions were far too high and onerous from the get-go to quash the still-existing and thriving black market.
• The transition period from legalization of possession and use to legalization of commercial sales was at utterly glacial pace, and still is in some states.  Not only has that been a drag, but it even gave the black market time to get a head start once the state telegraphed its intentions at least a year or two in advance.
• Only specific types of dedicated stores (dispensaries) can sell it legally.  Unlike alcohol or tobacco in most states.
• Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol, and even Big Pharma, all once sworn enemies of cannabis and cannabis legalization, are now getting a piece of the action by heavily investing in a rapidly growing cannabis industry that is making artificially high profits from being propped up by onerous regulations that keep smaller competitors out.
• And last but not least, legalization at the federal level is still pending, fully TEN YEARS after the first states began to legalize recreational cannabis at the state level.

Let's do a thought experiment:  Imagine if all of these rules and regulations were to suddenly apply to tomatoes.  What would happen to the market?  What would develop as a result?  Can you say, "Big Tomato"?  And a massive tomato black market in the shadow of it all as well.  Now, that sounds pretty silly indeed.  Tomatoes are not psychoactive drugs, after all.  But now apply this paradigm to alcohol, tobacco, or even coffee or tea.  Doesn't sound quite so farfetched now, does it?

On the other side, some rules have been roundly criticized for being too lax, most notably the potency limits (or more accurately, the lack thereof) for commercial sales compared to countries like Canada and Uruguay.  And as long as potency limits are reasonable and phased down gradually, it is quite unlikely that they will foment black market sales significantly more than the status quo does.  Ditto for taxing cannabis based on potency (X cents per milligram of THC), which only a few states do now.

The federal legalization efforts keep stalling as well, due in part to well-meaning legislators trying to shoehorn so much social justice stuff into it, and in part due to other legislators that still oppose cannabis.  While the social justice stuff is good, it may be an overreach compared to getting through a bill that simply removes cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, period.  Or better yet, one like Bruce Cain's MERP Model that also explicitly allows unlimited, untaxed, and unregulated self-cultivation of cannabis for anyone over 18, while not precluding legal taxed and regulated commercial sales alongside it.  The black market and the emerging Big Pot oligopolies would thus both be destroyed in one fell swoop, plus all of the other benefits of full legalization.  That's the power of ABUNDANCE, baby!

So what are we waiting for?  Time to finish the job already!

UPDATE:  A new study finds that there is a very strong inverse correlation between the number of legal dispensaries per capita, and the size of the black market.  Local bans on dispensaries, largely due to NIMBY politics, and most notably found in large swathes of California, seem to be perpetuating the black market, basically.  In other news, study finds that water is wet and the sun rises in the east.  

And this NIMBY-ism is completely unfounded, as honest research finds that legal dispensaries actually increase property values and decrease crime in their neighborhoods.  Let that sink in for a moment.

The Most Bizarre Ageist Law In All Of History

New York now has the dubious honor of having enacted the most bizarre ageist law in all of recorded history.  Passed in November 2021, it went largely unnoticed until a photo from an Albany convenience store about it went viral in recent weeks.  So what is this new and ridiculous law?

Apparently, in New York you need to be 21 or older to buy cans of....whipped cream.  Yes, you read that right.  That is because whipped cream cans contain nitrous oxide (N2O, whippits, or laughing gas) as a propellant, that can give one a brief high when inhaled.  If you honestly felt your IQ just drop ten points or more while reading this....

It is hard to begin to list all the ways this law is both stupid and wrong on so many levels:

• Of all the abusable inhalants out there (glue, paint, gasoline, aerosols, gases, solvents, "poppers", "rush", etc.) out there, nitrous oxide, especially in the form of whipped cream cans, is probably the least dangerous one of all.
• Many far more hazardous abusable but legal substances have either no age limit at all, or an age limit of 18 at most. Singling out whipped cream makes zero sense whatsoever.
• There is not currently any reported trend of teens and young adults using whippets in large numbers, nor was there before the law went into effect either.  It is really not a very popular way for young people to get high.
• Other sources of nitrous oxide gas can be readily purchased online.
• Whipped cream is clearly NOT only used as a way to get high.  But it is yet another thing people need to show ID for these days, because reasons. 
• And last but not least, setting the age limit at 21, fully three years higher than the age of majority (18), is inherently overreaching, illiberal, arbitrary unjust and ageist discrimination.

In other words, there is absolutely ZERO justification for such an ageist abomination.  But sadly, we are not really all that surprised that they would do this.  First it was alcohol, then tobacco, then cannabis, and then it was only a matter of time before they would find a way to make 21 the new 18 in other ever more illiberal ways as well.  As capitalism devolves to "late capitalism", so too does ageism devolve to "late ageism" as well, with all of its increasing absurdities.

UPDATE:  Apparently, the way the actual law is written, it really only applies to whipped cream chargers, those little steel cartridges containing nitrous oxide for use in fancy whipped cream dispensers, not cans of whipped cream itself.  Those chargers are the ones that are more likely to be used to get high by cracking and discharging the contents into a large balloon and then inhaling from the balloon.  Still a ridiculous law, but they are apparently attempting enforcing it beyond its actual scope by requiring ID to buy whipped cream cans.

For the chargers specifically, we could almost understand setting the age limit at 18 perhaps.  But 21 is way too ridiculous either way.  And any age limit on the whipped cream cans is beyond ridiculous.

(The UK appears to be even more into the moral panic about nitrous oxide lately, exaggerating the dangers, and there has been talk about banning it, but interestingly nothing about a 21 age limit.)

Does Lowering BAC Limit To 0.05% Actually Save Lives?

We at Twenty-One Debunked have long supported lowering the legal BAC limit for DUI/DWI to 0.05%, with nuance and graduated penalties, based on what we thought was rock-solid research supporting such a move from the current 0.08% limit in most of the USA.  However, a pair of more recent British studies casts serious doubt on whether such a move will actually save any lives at all by itself.

The study, in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet of all places, looks at a sort of natural experiment where Scotland lowered their BAC limit from 0.08% to 0.05% in 2014, while England and Wales kept it at 0.08% throughout.  The results?  Scotland saw no significant absolute difference in weekly traffic crashes after the change compared with before, and even saw a statistically significant 7% increase in crashes relative to England and Wales.  Similar results were found when looking only at serious, fatal, or single-vehicle nighttime crashes, hence the results were robust as well.  And all of this was after adjustment for several possible confounders.  The study also found that, contrary to what some might predict, no overall change in per capita alcohol consumption in Scotland either, and only a 0.7% decrease in on-premise alcohol consumption.  Can you say, "Whoops!"?

(And no, the study was NOT funded by the alcohol industry or any of its front groups.  Sorry.)

Thus, it seems that while lowering the BAC limit from 0.15% to 0.10% and then to 0.08% long ago probably did save a significant number of lives (though the exact number is debatable), further lowering it from 0.08% to 0.05% has very diminishing returns at best.  And it can perhaps even backfire at worst. The Australian success story was far more likely due to very tough enforcement of DUI laws in general (including, but not limited to, their legendary random breath testing (RBT) program), while the Continental European success story was likely due to the same, plus world-class public transportation as well.

So why are the above results so lackluster then?  Well, as Darren Grant noted in his famous study debunking the effectiveness of zero tolerance BAC laws for people under 21, it should really come as no surprise to an economist, who is used to thinking on the margin.  While driving impairment indeed begins long before reaching 0.08% or even 0.05%, it rises exponentially with each drink.  Thus, higher BACs are exponentially more dangerous than lower ones.  And the decision to have one's next drink based on trying to stay within the legal limit, even if a lower limit had the same deterrent effect at that limit, would have exponentially less effect that the decision not to cross a higher threshold.  (If anything, it's even MORE exponential for younger drivers, not less.)  And apparently once when the limit goes down to 0.05% or lower, any additional lifesaving effect over and above lowering the limit to 0.08% simply gets lost in the statistical noise.  That is especially true if the penalty is the same for crossing a lower threshold, since there is literally no marginal deterrence effect against each additional drink beyond that threshold.

(Grant also did a sort of sequel to that study in 2016, again drawing similar conclusions.)

We already know that the vast, vast majority of DUI casualties are concentrated among extremely high BAC drivers, usually 0.15%+ (average 0.16%) and often ones who do so repeatedly and frequently.  These drunk drivers are sometimes called "hardcore" drunk drivers, and are the most resistant to changing their behavior.  And most of those are in fact alcoholics to one degree or another.  They would, of course, laugh at the idea of a BAC limit being lowered to 0.05%, or at the very least, wouldn't exactly agonize over it.  This is all common knowledge, and not at all controversial, except of course among MADD and similar zealots.

Thus, if we as a society decide to set the BAC limit at 0.05%, or indeed any number below 0.08%, there should be steeply graduated penalties, with 0.05% (or 0.02% for young or novice drivers) being a mere traffic violation with a modest fine and short-term license suspension, and no criminal record, 0.08-0.10% being a misdemeanor with a steeper fine and longer license suspension or revocation, 0.10-0.15% being misdemeanor with an even steeper fine and even longer license revocation and mandatory jail time, and 0.15%+ being a felony with permanent or semi-permanent license revocation, very steep fines, vehicle forfeiture, and a stiff prison sentence.  Repeat offenses of 0.08% or higher would carry the same penalties as a 0.15%+ BAC, as would driving above 0.08% with a child under 16 in the vehicle.

We also know that swiftness and certainty of punishment, or the perception of such, is a far greater deterrent than severity.  Thus, automatic administrative penalties, separate from any criminal penalties, are found to be more effective that any criminal laws on the books, most notably in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.

Of course, we would be remiss if we did not discuss the stunning success of special DUI/DWI courts.  These are diversion programs that allow DUI offenders to plead guilty and complete coerced treatment and enforced abstinence from alcohol instead of jail or other penalties.  And they work quite well, with far lower recidivism rates than for those who do not enter such programs.  There are two types of DUI offenders these days:  1) relative normies who simply make dumb decisions and can be "scared straight", and 2) hardcore drunk drivers.  And DUI courts actually get to the root of the problem for the latter.

But first, we need to get these ticking time bombs off of the roads before they kill or maim innocent people.  Australian-style RBT is one blunt way to do it, but that would not likely pass constitutional muster in the USA. And even then, the long-run effects of Australia's RBT were not very different than those of American-style sobriety checkpoints when studied in the 1980s.  Tougher and sustained enforcement in general really seems to be the key.  And that can of course be done more effectively and cost-effectively with roving and saturation patrols, that look for signs of actually impaired drivers on the roads.  Especially in the many states that do not allow sobriety checkpoints to take place, they HAVE to rely on DUI patrols instead.

(Twenty-One Debunked recently came up with an ingenious idea to turn roving and saturation police patrols against DUI into a COPS-like reality TV show called "Operation Rovin' Eyes", complete with ride-alongs for community members as well.)

Seasoned drunk drivers know how to avoid the checkpoints with ease.  But with roving and saturation patrols, they will soon learn (either the easy way, or the hard way) that you can run, but you can't hide.  "Roving eyes...are watching YOU!" would be a good slogan to publicize the program.  The "fish in a barrel" method, that is, parking a police car outside bars, clubs, or parties and catching would-be drunk drivers before they get on the road, would also be a great complement to such patrols as well.

And while we're at it, let's get all of the garden-variety reckless, negligent, and distracted drivers off the road as well.  The same patrols will of course get them too.

It's time to stop tilting at proverbial windmills, and finish the job for good.  So what are we waiting for?

P.S.  The drinking age in the UK is 18, in case you didn't already know.  Kinda like most of the world.

UPDATE:  What about weed?  Unlike with alcohol, Twenty-One Debunked does not support any per se limits for cannabis, only rational prima facie ones that are rebuttable, similar to what Colorado has.  The complex pharmacokinetics and lack of correlation between blood THC levels and actual impairment renders any per se legal threshold to be inherently unscientific, and there is still zero evidence that such per se laws save any lives or improve public safety at all.  While cannabis can indeed impair driving, and a fortiori when combined with alcohol, it is best to focus on those drivers that are actually impaired, rather than to snare perfectly sober drivers in the dragnet due to mere trace amounts of THC in one's system.

Japan Actually Encouraging Young Adults To Drink More Alcohol

Concerned about falling alcohol tax revenue, as well company profits, the government of Japan is now literally encouraging young adults to drink more alcohol.  Yes, you read that right.  They are even going so far as to hold a contest.  Apparently, alcohol consumption among young people has been falling since the 1990s, and even more so recently, with tax and business revenues falling along with it.

But most surprisingly of all, they are still NOT planning on lowering their drinking age to 18 to match their new age of majority.  They lowered their general age of majority earlier this year from 20 to 18, but still kept their smoking and drinking ages at 20, because reasons.  Or something.  Yes, really.

Stranger than fiction indeed!  And not nearly enough (facepalm) in the world to cover this!

Legalization Of Cannabis Still Not A Disaster After All

One of the zombie lies that cannabis prohibitionists luuurrrve to shill is that legalization would inevitably result in mass carnage on the highways (if not also off of the highways as well) from stoned driving.  These fearmongers can be every bit as hysterical as MADD is infamous for being in regards to alcohol.  Studies to date on the matter have been mixed, but have been generally pointing in the direction of it being largely a non-problem overall, at least compared to the counterfactual of not legalizing cannabis.  While it is true that cannabis can impair driving, it typically does so less than alcohol does, and regardless it does not necessarily follow that legalization would automatically result in more traffic casualties overall that would otherwise have occurred.

Enter the latest study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) using data from 2009-2019, the largest study yet on the matter.  While it purportedly found that recreational legalization was associated with a small increase in both fatal and nonfatal injury crashes overall, there is far less here than meets the eye.  For starters, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which states saw increases and which ones saw decreases (yes, some states actually saw decreases post-legalization) in such casualties, even after controlling for a whole host of potential confounders and including several comparison states (five legalization states and five non-legalization states from the same general region of the country). Such extreme heterogeneity strongly suggests that at least some, if not all, of the observed effect is spurious.  More importantly, legalization of recreational cannabis use itself appeared to be responsible for nearly all of the observed effect, while legalization of retail sales (which occurred later, often a year or more later) had no significant effect (actually, a small decrease on average, go figure).  You read that right--it is exactly backwards from what the standard prohibitionist narrative would claim, also suggesting a spurious effect.  And finally, in any case the size of the effect (5.8% for injury crashes and 4.1% for fatal crashes) on average is basically too weak to conclusively prove a causal link from a single study alone, but especially from a study with the aforementioned issues like this one.  

In other words, one can see that there is barely any signal in the noise, and that supposed signal may very well turn out to have been entirely noise all along.

So once again, legalization was NOT anywhere even remotely close to disaster after all.  And most interestingly of all, the study authors note that, “the estimated effect of marijuana legalization on crash rates is only slightly lower than the estimated effects of lowering the legal drinking age in the United States from 21 to 18.”  Which, as we at Twenty-One Debunked have noted time and again, are both nowhere near as large or scary as the prohibitionists and ageists want us to believe.  And an honest interpretation of the aforementioned study would actually put it far closer to the famous Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) study than any pro-21 study.

UPDATE:  Nevertheless, we skeptics do of course need to be careful not to give into the temptation to be "pseudocritics" here.  Blithely, casually, and reflexively mocking and dismissing any paper for its apparent statistical noise or seemingly puny effect size while ignoring nuance, details, or context (often without even reading the paper in question) is intellectually lazy at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.  The above analysis, however, is NOT an example of this pitfall.  Pointing out specific concrete issues or inconsistencies that seriously weaken or vitiate the conclusions, while keeping it all in context is not an example of this fallacy.  Nor is pointing out, a fortiori in fact, the public policy implications or lack thereof (a second-order question that inherently goes beyond the science itself) that the prohibitionists so desperately wish for despite being a category error.  And those who doggedly cling to even the flimsiest cherry-picked results and tiniest effect sizes, to push a thoroughly illiberal agenda while ignoring an honest cost-benefit analysis in the name of a perverted and Hobbesian version of the precautionary principle, are guilty of a categorically far worse intellectual failing than even the silliest pseudocritics are.

When we see that cannabis legalization and non-legalization states in recent years, and MLDA 18, 19, 20, and 21 states in the 1970s and 1980s, are all more or less within error bounds of each other overall in terms of traffic casualties, at least in the long run, it makes far more sense to err on the side of liberty.

And finally, to say that small effect sizes, especially with wide confidence intervals or large heterogeneity, are weak correlations and thus should be approached with caution before jumping to conclusions is NOT the same as saying they should be automatically dismissed out of hand.  Those who argue otherwise don't seem to do nuance well, to put it mildly.

Cannabis Use Associated With DECREASED Covid Severity

Two and a half years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, our unofficial working theory was finally confirmed:  cannabis use was recently found in a new study to be associated with decreased Covid severity, contrary to what some pundits have claimed.  Remember, our own theory was that that was why states (such as Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, DC, Alaska, and the entire West Coast) and countries (Canada, Netherlands, and Uruguay) with at least de facto legalized recreational cannabis (as of January 2020) saw lower Covid-related death rates compared to places where cannabis was not yet (if ever) fully legal for recreational use by early 2020, and especially when compared to their neighbors.

Some exceptions are Michigan, Illinois, and Nevada, of course.  Those states did not do very well with Covid despite cannabis legalization in place by 2020, but the first two were latecomers with relatively delayed implementation of their legalization.  And the Netherlands, contrary to popular opinion, does not have full legalization, but rather a quasi-legalization scheme where, as the locals there would say, "the front door is legal but the back door is illegal".

But overall, it seems our theory panned out quite nicely.  Even when looking simply at cannabis use rates, rather than legalization, a similar pattern emerges overall.  Think the Southern US states vs Northern states, or Easten Europe vs Western Europe, or even Sweden vs. Denmark to some extent.

Game. Set. Match.  Any questions?

"No Safe Level" Junk Science, Again

Is there really "no safe level" of alcohol use before the arbitrary age of....40?  And do the risks always outweigh the benefits from the outset?  A new study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seems to claim that, just four years after the same "experts" claimed that there is no safe level for anyone of any age.  But again, as we already noted back then, the specious claim of "no safe level" is a classic red flag for manufactured junk science with a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda, dressed up in the guise of the precautionary principle.

First, the ontological criticism:  It is well-known that excessive alcohol consumption is harmful in so many ways, for all ages.  But if even (gasp!) radiation supposedly has a safe level for practical purposes, why on Earth can't that be true for alcohol as well?  Our own bodies actually produce small amounts of the stuff endogenously, after all.  (Ok, so they concede maybe a shot glass of beer (lol) per day might be safe.)

Second, there is of course reporting bias:  heavy drinkers tend to play down how much they drink in surveys, so the safe drinking thresholds may very well be higher than survey results suggest.  Who knows?  Also, they notably did not distinguish between different patterns of drinking either.  There is a world of difference between having two drinks every day, and having all 14 drinks (!) in one night per week, despite them both being the same average amount of alcohol per week.  (Not that Twenty-One Debunked actually encourages anyone to do either, by the way.)

Third, conveniently and arbitrarily walking back the original conclusions for the dominant age group in society, but not for younger folks, really smacks of special pleading and card-stacking fallacies.

Fourth, even if it were true, it does not follow that prohibition, age based or otherwise, is the solution.  I mean, since when did "give me liberty of give me death" become "give me absolute safety or else"?  Even from a strictly utilitarian perspective, people who sometimes choose pleasure over longevity to one degree or another are not necessarily irrational or even immoral.  Like it or not, the alcohol genie is out of the bottle, and banning it or unduly restricting it will only make it that much more dangerous by driving it underground, as we learned the hard way.

If the powers that be are so concerned about the "externalities" that even light to moderate drinkers supposedly impose on society, simply tax alcohol more then. Problem solved.  Otherwise, they really need to stay in their lane and leave people alone.

And finally, consider the source.  The Gates Foundation may want to look in the mirror before pointing the finger at others, and particularly look into the contents of the vials of their favorite experimental product du jour, if you catch my drift.

Oh, and notably, they did seem to distinguish over 21 versus under 21 either, so anyone who has the gall to try to use this specious study to somehow justify the 21 drinking age is really grasping at straws.