Prohibition Lives... and Kills

I was chatting with an acquantance today, who is understandably a bit conflicted between her liberal ideals and her perspective as a parent on the subject of legalising marijuana. On one hand, she thinks that the government shouldn't be deciding what substances responsible adults use. On the other hand, she worries about the fact that legal marijuana would also be easier for her teenage sons to get, and she knows better than anyone just how responsible they are not.

I had no answer for her (I'm not a parent, how could I presume to?), so I changed the subject to alcohol, which is arguably less harmful than marijuana. It's certainly more addictive, more widely abused, and poses a clearer danger of overdose. American society's approach to alcohol is well-intended, but backfires badly.

In the early days of the Republic there were no laws restricting who could drink alcohol. Those were simpler, less legalistic times. In the 1920's alcohol was outlawed by Constitutional Amendment, an experiment which failed so badly that it became the only Amendment to be repealed. Afterward, the drinking age was commonly set at 21, but was lowered to 18 on the strength of the argument that someone old enough to sign binding contracts, or to serve in the military, should be considered old enough to drink a beer. But with 18-year-olds still getting the hang of driving automobiles, and going to the same high schools as 14-year-olds, that led to increasing traffic fatalities and under-age drinking.

The federal government's "solution" was to coerce state legislatures into raising the drinking age back up to 21. There's evidence that this has reduced the rate of drunk driving fatalities, which is good. But it seems to me that this is happening at the cost of turning more of us into alcoholics instead.

A drinking age of 21 cuts off a substantial number of high school students from friends who can buy for them. This doesn't stop high-schoolers from drinking, of course, but let's suppose it does. This means that, instead of learning to handle alcohol under the guidance of their parents, most people get their first unfettered access to it in college, or during their first few years living on their own after high school. A college freshman can get his hands on alcohol without too much difficulty, but he has to do it on the sly. Unless he's got a really good fake ID, he can't drink in bars or restaurants. Instead he drinks at keggers, or in his dorm room. Can you think of a better way to teach alcohol abuse? I can't.

Of all the environments in which a person could learn how to handle alcohol, I'd rank them in the following order of preference:
1) At home (i.e. where his family lives).
2) In a restaurant.
3) In a bar.
4) In his dorm room or apartment.
5) At parties with his peers.

Current drinking laws forbid (1), and a parent who lets their under-age children drink could face criminal charges and even loss of custody. Laws against (2) and (3) are usually enforced pretty strictly, with stings and PR campaigns routinely ensuring that these don't happen. Which leaves us with (4) teenagers drinking themselves into a stupor in their rooms (some colleges have rules against alcohol in dorms, which can make this difficult), or (5) going to a place where the main activity is drinking as much as possible and perhaps driving home! In other words, the more unhealthy the environment, the more likely that's where an 18-year-old is going to learn how to drink.

I consider myself kinda lucky in that regard. I drank a little in high school, but my social life wasn't that great, so it was fairly rare... a New Year's Eve party here, a 12-pack shared by a friend who nicked it from his parents, etc. But the year I graduated from high school, at the age of 18, a friend and I went on 6-week biking trip through Great Britain. Now, Britain's pub licencing laws were more than a little bizarrely puritanical (closed for a few hours in the afternoon, and shutting down for the night well before midnight), but they never cared how old you were, as long as you seemed "adult".

So I learned to drink: in pubs, with a good friend, in a situation where hangovers the next day would simply be a waste of the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we'd each been saving up for. We drank, of course. In fact, we drank quite well, sampling beers that could actually be enjoyed for their flavor, not just for their alcohol content. (This was long before the "microbrew" phenomenon got underway in America. The most "exotic" beer available back home was Coors.)

When I got back to the Colonies and went away to college, beer was nothing new to me. Having to find someone to buy it for me was a nuisance, that's all. Meanwhile, my friends were getting their first taste of drinking without having to hide it from their parents. Sure, classes tended to keep the week-night drinking to a minimum, but on the weekends, it was off to the keggers. There was a sort of Darwinian angle, with those who couldn't juggle binge drinking with schoolwork flunking out. But that sets a pattern that's definitely going to lead to problems down the road.

I know there's no way the drinking age is going to get lowered. It'd probably just take us back to the Bad Old Days of high-schoolers wrapping their cars around trees on weekends. But maybe we could take a cue from the recent trend in how to handle driving privileges. Michigan has instituted a phase-in program, in which new drivers are restricted and have to spend a certain amount of time driving with their parents. I'm not suggesting that teenagers be required to log how much time they've spent drinking with their parents, but it seems to me that letting them drink under parental supervision (definitely at home, and why not in restaurants?) would go along way toward helping them develop responsible drinking habits, by letting them learn in the best environments possible rather than the worst.

And maybe once we figure out how to handle alcohol responsbily in our society, we'll have some answers for how to handle marijuana.