Old Coots and Underage Drinking

I know it is a real tired old argument—it's just that it is so compelling.

If eighteen year olds are old enough to get their brains blown out in Iraq, then they are old enough to have a beer.

In any logical society it would be a no brainer—and that would be the end of the story. Either let them booze it up-- or take away suffrage, the right to marry, to contract, to get killed in foreign wars—in other words, all the trappings of adulthood.

One of the most absurd things I used to see in my days in the criminal courts, and this is a high bar, was the twenty year old charged with underage possession—in ADULT court.

I am willing to go along with the modern version of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and admit that underage drinkers do more drunk driving, and have more auto accidents than the population as a whole.

However, I have noticed, on those rare occasions that I go clubbing, that most of the patrons tend to be young. I suspect, if the rate of drunk driving by eighteen to twenty-one year olds is compared to twenty-one to twenty-three year olds, these frightful statistics are not nearly as persuasive.

The statistics only become shocking when the dudes, who hit the sack after an exciting Senior Dinner at Denny's, are factored in.

So,it was nice to see that some of the college presidents are finally coming to their senses, and are lobbying for an end to this lingering vestige of Prohibition.

Old coots have been wringing their hands over wayward students since at least the time of Aristotle. However, with the ascendancy of the authoritarian Nanny State and perpetual Millennial Generation childhood, institutions of higher learning became increasingly serious in their efforts to stamp out the age old problem of partying.

Yes booze is a killer. Some 100,000 Americans die every year, when you include auto accidents and other collateral damage. But even though eighty percent of the nation's 12,000,000 college students drink, only 36 campus deaths a year can be attributed to alcohol.

Even if MADD's outlandish figure of 1,400 alcohol related college deaths is accurate, it is a minuscule percentage of the college population.

Indeed, since two of every three college undergraduates is of legal age to drink, only about 12 deaths occur as a result of illegal drinking.

Of course one death from alcohol is a tragedy, but society's hysteria is unwarranted. And it is about time we quit bowing to every whim and dictate of the modern day Carrie Nations.

When the costs and benefits are rationally considered, it hardly makes sense for college administrators and law enforcement agencies to get their panties in a knot over drinking by a group of people, who are adults for every purpose except the consumption of alcohol.

This is the type of expensive and ineffective nanny state authoritarianism, which causes those, who are blessed with a functioning brain, to go out and get blotto.