I’m sure this is true. It’s much harder to be their age now than when I was, I think – it’s much harder to be *anyone* now.

Also, mind altering drugs in legal versions like Ritalin and Zoloft are pushed on them by authorities from kindergarten on. These drugs are HEAVY from what I have been able to gather, and the rational person will laugh if they’re getting “alcohol education” from the same person as is pushing heavy pharmaceuticals!!!

My own kids started their “under-age drinking” by the time they were in Grade Eight. By the time my oldest son was in Grade Eleven, I seriously considered socking him into rehab. For some odd reason, he cleaned up his act by himself. I never solved the mystery of how he and his friends got the cash for the booze. When he got old enough, he told me that kids stole the liquor from their parents’ cabinets for the most part. Glad to say it was never from mine because I didn’t have one.

When oldest son went to an American university, the binge drinking started all over again with a crew of kids away from home for the first time. And later fizzled out again. But I’ve no doubt that it affected his abilities and choices in an extremely negative way and I know he agrees.

As a parent who cared and had a pretty good relationship with my kiddo, I can only say, yeah, parents can be part of the problem, but only part. Recently I read something about the amounts of gin consumed in the UK during the early decades of the industrial revolution, enabling people to survive, if only barely, the otherwise intolerable social and familial upheaval. Surely the desire to get blotto, when it occurs in the ways we’re seeing with kids and binge drinking these days, has causes that we just haven’t yet really understood, yet may not be all that mysterious. I’m not sure that trying to “educate” them about the dangers of alcohol is going to solve the problem. Not saying we shouldn’t try though.

At the same time, the type of student drawn to a small SLAC in a tiny Iowan town differs considerably from the students who attend the ginormous University of California campus where I work. Campus size and students’ orientation toward such things as academics and social service also play into whether drinking gets out of hand.

And Rad, I totally agree with your point about the prolonged adolescence argument. If this prolonged adolescence and consequence-free construction of the “college experience” is so great, why don’t they live at home and puke in their own parents’ bushes? I’m tired of the whole college-town-as-Bourbon Street. I know some towns market themselves that way–do we really need to do that for Ames, Iowa and College Park, PA?

Then I worked at a SLAC which had keg parties for underage people in the very dorms. I was horrified at the amount of drinking, drugs, and random sex … in which people said they engaged because since you paid up front a high price for the year’s tuition and lodging, they didn’t even have cash on them to go to the movies off campus.

That was when I realized my father had been right, and what he had been thinking about, when he made certain
remarks about colleges and universities whose catalogues I had requested. One comment I remember was to think twice about Grinell type schools and locations because in a snowy small town, far from everything, there were whole swaths of people who only studied and drank!

Anyway I’m liberal on these things so I favor lowering the drinking age but I don’t think it will solve a great many problems. Certainly not at a place like mine where everyone drinks like mad no matter what. And 21 is an inconvenient cutoff age anyway, you always then have half the students underage and half not. Might as well make ‘em legal, it improves logistics. The age was 18 when I first moved to Louisiana and believe it or not it *seemed* to improve matters insofar as you didn’t have people obsessed with sneaking around to find ways to drink.

I do favor having alternative activities available, though. Many students do have other interests and will pursue them over just drinking if there’s a way to do it.

One empirical question for those who do this kind of research (or try to) — has lowering the drinking age lowered the drunk fatality/injury rate on the road? If I remember correctly, one of the proponents of increasing the drinking age was MADD. So my comments below are not meant to take away from the problem of binge and other forms of excessive drinking.

I think that 21 minimum is one of the marks of prolonged adolescence — society of infantilization. When you consider how much marketing is geared toward teen-agers — movies for 13 year old boys, Brittany music — there is an interest in keeping people as young as possible for as long as possible. In other words, the message is, you are not responsible and mature enough to make this decision — it probably ties to social views on political participation (you can vote, but it won’t matter because of low participation rate and easy manipulation by political operatives) — and yes, wink wink, you are mature enough to decide whether to take up arms!!

One thing I will say: the whole acid-and-shrooms thing is either an east coast or a small rural liberal arts college thing, as I didn’t even know they existed when I was at my undergrad — there it was all about the heroin. And really, you’ve gotta weigh the drinking culture and availability against what’s going on in the drug scene.

I’m perfectly persuadable that lowering the age could contribute toward a constructive solution, I just didn’t think the author(s) of the manifesto acknowledged any duty to make an actual case to that end, beyond critiquing the reverse strategy of raising the drinking age. _The Myth-’s point about accountability is crucial.