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.

To South Africa: Don't Be Like Us, Seriously

In recent international news, South Africa has apparently been getting closer to raising their legal drinking age to 21, which if it passes will put them among the tiny handful of countries with the drinking age that high (Palau, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, some Muslim countries, and of course the biggest outlier of all, the USA).  So here is our advice to South Africa:

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.

The Verdict Is In: Legalizing Weed Does Not Increase Crime Rates

The latest studies on the matter have confirmed what the TSAP and Twenty-One Debunked have kinda always known.  Legalizing weed does NOT seem to increase crime rates like the prohibitionists often claimed it would, and if anything, appears to decrease violent and property crimes a bit, as well as improve their clearance rates by police.  But we could've told you that years ago, for those actually willing to listen.

The theory for how legalization of cannabis would reduce crime is fairly simple.  First, it frees up relatively scarce police and other resources that would otherwise be used to bust people for weed, and allows such resources to be put to more productive uses (i.e. targeting real crime rather than victimless crime).  Secondly, cannabis is basically a non-violent drug, and can often substitute for alcohol, which is often (rightly or wrongly) linked to violence to one degree or another.  Thirdly, there is the systemic aspect, the violence linked to the illicit drug trade itself, which would self-evidently decrease if not disappear upon legalization, at least with regard to the substance being legalized. And finally, victimless crime laws, especially widely unpopular ones like cannabis prohibition (and, of course, the 21 drinking age) erode respect for the law in general and also erode cooperation and cohesion between the police and the community.  Thus, it really doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how removing such illiberal and pharisaical laws from the books would tend to decrease crime in general.

What about the opposite theory?  Not the long-debunked one that cannabis per se actually causes violent and property crime (which is rather silly on its face, mind you), but the one that claims that cannabis prohibition is a useful crime-fighting tool for police?  Well, as the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding, and we really don't see any credible evidence of that on balance.  Any utility that such an abomination would have in that regard appears to be more than outweighed by its very real downsides, and thus we can consider that theory debunked as well.

(Cue the Law and Order DUN DUN sound effect.)

We need to legalize cannabis in all 50 states and all territories as well, yesterday, and lower the age limit to 18 as well, just like our neighbor to the north.  It is LONG overdue.  So what are we waiting for?

You May Not Like It, But Here's the Answer to (At Least Greatly Reducing) College Rape and Sexual Assault

As we had noted in a previous post four years ago, rape and sexual assault is a persistent epidemic in the USA, including (but not limited to) college campuses nationwide.  Lately, the chattering classes have been endlessly wringing their hands about it for years, but little real progress has been made in recent years, and since the Trump administration began we seem to have even regressed a bit in that regard, the #MeToo movement notwithstanding.

Most rapes and sexual assaults, especially those involving college students on or near campus, are committed by people known to the victim, and many if not most of those involve alcohol to one degree or another, whether by the perpetrator, the victim, or both.  We should first and foremost note that the only thing that actually causes rape is the rapists themselves, period.   While alcohol (among other substances) can indeed fuel it and is often used as a weapon to incapacitate victims, rape would simply not happen without rapists, period.  And the onus should always fall on men not to rape in the first place, instead of falling on women not to "get themselves raped".  The fact that so many people still deny such an obvious truth in 2018 shows just how far we have yet to go towards eliminating or even reducing this epidemic, and those who blame or otherwise put the onus on potential or actual victims are in fact part of the problem.

We seriously need to drain the proverbial swamp of rape culture, yesterday, and thus revoke the rapists' social license to operate.  Culturally, we need to tackle the root causes of sexual violence by rejecting the highly toxic "commodity model" of sexuality and replacing it with the "performance model" (while also avoiding the negative connotations and pitfalls of the word "performance"), and more generally rejecting the "dominator model" of society and replacing it with the "partnership model".  And for alcohol, we need to recognize that while adopting a "Prohibition-Lite" approach of any sort is most likely to backfire and would throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, its link with sexual violence still needs to be dealt with in the meantime as cultural changes can take much time to occur.

So what measures can be taken in the very near term to quickly reduce or at least take the dangerous edge off of this seemingly intractable epidemic?  The reader may or may not like the answer, but here goes:

1. Lower the legal drinking age to 18, yesterday, full stop.  The 21 drinking age makes drinking that much more dangerous than it has to be by forcing it underground, which can put young drinkers in more dangerous situations that increase the risk of sexual assault, and the law itself can be used as a cudgel to silence victims.
2. Raise the tax on alcoholic beverages, both federally as well as at the state and local level (especially in college towns), with extra levies on bulk alcohol such as kegs, cases, and handles. Studies have shown a significant inverse correlation between alcohol prices and rape in general.
3. Legalize cannabis for everyone 18 and older, yesterday.  Cannabis is clearly the safer choice in that regard, as it is highly unlikely to fuel violence or be used as a date-rape drug the way that alcohol all too often is.
4. Pass "Yes Means Yes" laws (aka affirmative consent laws) similar to California's.  If properly written, these laws will essentially eliminate the concept of so-called "gray area rape" by putting the onus on the initiator of sexual activity to be sure that they actually have consent before proceeding further.
5. Last but not least, hold the perpetrators accountable for a change, no matter how powerful or privileged they happen to be.  That includes enforcing both criminal laws as well as campus conduct policies to the fullest extent of the law.  No more Brock Turners.

As for the idea of colleges trying to influence upward the prices of cheap alcohol at parties (particularly Greek parties) that are typically $5 or so at the door for all-you-can-drink, that would be rather difficult to enforce in practice.  But if the drinking age was lowered to 18, most frats would likely end up having a "going out of business party" since their modern-day speakeasy services would no longer be necessary.  And those that remain would, in practice, throw less frequent parties and/or  ones with less beer (or liquor) to go around if the tax on such beverages is also hiked as well.

Doing these things will go a long way towards reducing the rape and sexual assault epidemic in the near term.  Anything less would be uncivilized. So what are we waiting for?

Do Alcohol Taxes Still Work to Save Lives?

Avid readers of our blog would note that Twenty-One Debunked supports raising the tax on alcoholic beverages almost as wholeheartedly as we support lowering the drinking age to 18.  And there are reams and reams of research evidence over many decades--locally, nationally, and internationally--that find that higher alcohol prices (and thus taxes) save lives both on and off the highways as well as reduce crime, violence, and other alcohol-related problems.   In contrast, the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age has not consistently demonstrated similar effectiveness in that regard, no matter what sort of pseudo-consensus exists in the minds of its most ardent supporters, and the best evidence thus far has exposed the specious claim of saving lives as little more than a mere statistical mirage all along.

That said, for the specific endpoint of alcohol-related traffic fatalities, among the reams of evidence there have been a few outlier studies that seem to cast doubt on the lifesaving effect of alcohol prices/taxes as well.  The most recent one in 2017 by McClelland and Iselin of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center studied the effects of the Illinois alcohol tax hikes in both 1999 and 2009, and found no long-term lifesaving effect from either one in terms of drunk driving deaths.  In contrast, a previous 2015 study by Wagenaar et al. had found a fairly large drop in alcohol-related traffic deaths following the 2009 Illinois tax hike, even after controlling for the effects of the Great Recession.  The biggest difference between the two studies was that McClelland and Iselin used the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) while Wagenaar et al. did not, and while a good method, like all methods it too can have its own share of pitfalls.

As for the other outlier studies, most of those are dissected and discussed in a 2015 replication review by David Roodman, which still concludes that a true lifesaving effect is likely.  One such outlier study is by Dee (1999), whose control for state-specific time trends apparently removed too much useful variation in state-level beer taxes.  And while Roodman did not discuss our all-time favorite study by Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), we should note that this study in fact began by replicating Dee (1999) using more years of data and including Alaska, Hawaii, and DC, and in contrast to Dee they did apparently find a fairly strong inverse correlation between beer taxes and 18-20 year old traffic deaths even after adjusting for state-specific time trends.

Granted, it is true that for the specific endpoint of DUI deaths, the price of alcohol may not be quite as important as it once was.  Drunk driving is far less common and far less socially acceptable than it was a generation ago, and legal sanctions against it are much stiffer now as well.  And with alcohol prices currently at a record low in relative terms, and alcohol taxes generally being a small portion of the overall price, the link between the two may not be as salient or noticeable as it once was due to being swamped or masked by other factors.  But that does not mean that it is ineffective, given the fact that several more recent studies continue to find such effects, and the numerous studies that continue find fairly large benefits in terms of reducing non-traffic deaths and harms as well (cirrhosis, unintentional injuries, cancer, crime, violence, STDs, etc.).

Thus, the overwhelming weight of the evidence still continues to support the idea that raising alcohol taxes/prices is an effective (and especially cost-effective) public health policy in terms of saving lives both on and off the highways as well as reducing alcohol-related problems in general.  And if it is high enough, it is also justified on Pigouvian grounds as well.  So what are we waiting for?