Im a current College Student and very soon I will be 20 years old. Am I upset that I can't drink? Of course I am. I have the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to drink responsibly and I am denied a basic right. I don't think the question is being looked at in the right way. You ask should we lower the legal drinking age? Its not really a question of should we but when should we and what constitutes a viable alternative without increasing death rates and hospitalizations or general harm to young people or the people they might harm.

You make claims about increased death rates in other countries due to alcohol use being greater than that of our own and there is no doubt that improper alcohol use contributes vastly to automotive death rates and such but you fail to see that a basic right is being denied. The right of 18 year old to drink should not be allowed or denied based on death rates or automotive fatalities. Look at the District of Columbia for example. Violence is a tremendous problem in certain parts of Washington D.C. but the supreme court is allowing guns to be sold there. A high rate of automotive fatalities and binge drinking hospitalizations shouldn't mean banning 18 year olds from drinking it just means the law isn't doing its job correctly. If there were harsher laws in place that scared the stupidity out of moronic young adults then drinking wouldn't be such a problem.

You also make claims against the Signatories of the Amethyst Initiative based on the current situation in America. Drinking is a problem around college campuses and this is something that they are trying to change. You fail to see that what they are trying to do is facilitate a culture and environment where drinking isn't a big deal. Where people go to college with the tools they need to drink socially and responsibly. So often we see oblivious college Freshman lacking in any sort of drinking experience causing tremendous harm to themselves. They hope to create a new culture after the fact and your still dealing with the problems today. Your statistics are also tremendously biased. You say that there is "likely a causal relationship" with the lowered young adult driver fatality rate. Well i'm sorry to say that just because you believe a relationship might be causal doesn't make it so. There are a plethora of other factors such as tremendous advances in automotive safety that are also relevant. Cars are safer than ever.

Let's get serious here there were about 1500 child fatalities in 2006 due to parental neglect (NCANDS) and there were 3,582 deaths by drowning in 2005 with a fourth of those drowning being under the age of 14. So essentially what your proposing is that people that want to have children should go through intensive courses and background checks ensuring that their children will be safe and well taken care of. Or, that people who want to get pools must do the same? Having a child is a fundamental human right and having a pool shouldn't be difficult. We don't live in tyranny this is America.

Finally the very Presidents that you so casually criticize are tremendous people and some of them have spent lifetimes educating young people. They have the knowledge and experience that comes with dealing with the youth of America first hand. These people know what they are talking about. They have experience on their side and you have weak statistics and biased arguments at best. Stick to what you know and I'm sure they won't encroach on pediatrics.


Signed,
-19 year old college student.

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Well said. You took apart the many gaps in the author's logic a lot better than I could have. If you don't already know about this group, you may be interested: http://www.youthrights.org/

"Violence is a tremendous problem in certain parts of Washington D.C. but the supreme court is allowing guns to be sold there."

Actually, you have always been able to purchase firearms in D.C. The court, in Heller vs. D.C., struck down the law banning the possession of functioning handguns in private residences and supported the individual, (as opposed to the collective or "the National Guard is the militia" right), right to keep and bear arms....

"If there were harsher laws in place that scared the stupidity out of moronic young adults then drinking wouldn't be such a problem."

PLEASE tell me how tough the law has to be to scare the "stupidity out of moronic young adults"? Should it be life in prison? Or, perhaps, just ten or twenty years in a maximum security prison would work. There is no such animal.

Making penalties tougher doesn't work. Scaring individuals in their twenties, who think they are immortal, is pretty much impossible. No one thinks that "they" are going to get caught. Oh, and not only morons drink, intelligent people who full understand the law and the consequences of breaking it also drink illegally.

It's not hard to take an idea to the extreme. There are definitely practical ways of curbing drinking and driving such as public humiliation (electronic billboards etc...). Also cars will eventually be manufactured that require breathalyzer tests to start at certain times and or for certain age groups. And I realize not only moron's drink but way to presume.

Sincerely,
Just another underage drinker.

I disagree strongly with Dr. Sanghavi, but I have to say, your post is irritating for entirely different reasons.

"So essentially what your proposing is that people that want to have children should go through intensive courses and background checks ensuring that their children will be safe and well taken care of. Or, that people who want to get pools must do the same? Having a child is a fundamental human right and having a pool shouldn't be difficult. We don't live in tyranny this is America."

The prose itself is juvenile, but the point is even worse. It's insight-deprived, logically vacuous, social liberalism taken to extreme, and it should be aggressively strangulated from your 19-year-old brain. First of all, is it our fundamental human right to bring a life into this world, and to then screw it up beyond all repair, not by design, but rather through the sheer probabilistic inevitability of stupidity? Only someone with no life experience would flaunt such a retarded point so brazenly. The responsibility to care for a life, much like the responsibility of deciding whether or not to terminate a fetus, is a monumental one. It's not a freaking privilege, like towel service at your gym, it is a burden, a good one, a profound and weighty task. It's not some sandwich board message to tout at a NOW rally.

Apparently, you can only grasp simple concepts like, democracy, and freedom, and tyranny, so I'll give you another one: accountability. You don't have an inalienable right to drink, or to drive. If you demonstrate incompetence behind the wheel, your government will deprive you of that right, as well they should. If you show that you're a dangerously bad parent, your children will become wards of the state.

Yet, you seem to believe that vehicular serial killers and baby shakers should be protected, and that their victims are merely the blood that, as Jefferson once said, from time to time, must refresh the tree of liberty.

Please don't ever type anything on the internet again.

...are you kidding me? If you feel that way shouldn't you be embarrassed that you've taken the time out to even respond to such a juvenile article. Oh and no response is necessary. I get it, you're an asshole who feels compelled to belittle people significantly younger than he. Well enough people seemed to like it. I guess they are all just very dumb. I apologize oh great one, forgive me.

"There are definitely practical ways of curbing drinking and driving such as public humiliation (electronic billboards etc...)."

Let's see, you're a drunk. You already hang out with other drunks. You don't spend much time in productive pursuits. You're probably not every interested in what other people think, just don't let them get in the way of you getting your next drink. Either that, or you are an underage drinker who doesn't pay attention to the law, anyway. So, exactly, how is "public humiliation" going to change your ways? Besides, public humiliation in the form of special license plates, et cetera has already been tried. Didn't work. Even when it didn't violate the 8th amendment.

The laws that require sex offenders to register and their images and personal information to be posted on the web is a good example of how "public humiliation" doesn't work. The majority of sex offenders are first time offenders, (all sex offenders offend once, not all offend more than once), and, therefore, immune to "public humiliation" as a curb on their commission of crimes. The websites and posters, et cetera are not effective, except to palliate our hysteria.

"cars will eventually be manufactured that require breathalyzer tests to start at certain times and or for certain age groups."

Let's see - probably before your time - but the government mandated seat belt interlocks on all cars manufactured after 1974. Unless your seat belt was fastened, the car wouldn't start. Unfortunately, if you put a package on the seat next to you, you had to fasten its seat belt, too. End result - a lot of cars wouldn't start when they should have. A lot of cars wouldn't start, period. The law lasted less than a year. When they changed the law, they allowed all the cars that had been made with seat belt interlocks to be modified to defeat the interlocks and start without the seat belts being fastened.

The technology exists, now, to put a breathalyzer in every car. They are put on some cars by court order. However, if they were required on every car, whether or not the driver had been convicted of drunk driving, they would go the way of the seat belt interlock. Very quickly. Imagine the tragedy and the liability for the breathalyzer manufacturer when someone dies when there is an emergency, they are perfectly sober and their car still won't start. Or, when a car stalls on railroad tracks or in a busy intersection and the person can't start it fast enough to prevent being hit and killed. I won't even go into the myriad of ways that breathalyzers in cars can be circumvented.

Your suggestions are "pie in the sky" stuff. They don't work. You talk about America not being tyrannical. Then you suggest things that are tyrannical - like forcing everyone, whether or not they are a drunk driver - to submit to a breathalyzer test every time they start their car.

If you know that it isn't only morons who drink and drive, why didn't you say that?