Drinking Age Laws

Alcohol use by young people is extremely dangerous - both to themselves and society at large. Underage alcohol use is associated with traffic fatalities, violence, unsafe sex, suicide, educational failure, and other problem behaviors that diminish the prospects of future success, as well as health risks â€" and the earlier teens start drinking, the greater the danger. Despite these serious concerns, the media continues to make drinking look attractive to youth, and it remains possible and even easy for teenagers to get access to alcohol. Why is this dangerous behavior so pervasive? What can be done to prevent it? What will work and who is responsible for making sure it happens? Reducing Underage Drinking addresses these questions and proposes a new way to combat underage alcohol use. It explores the ways in which may different individuals and groups contribute to the problem and how they can be enlisted to prevent it. Reducing Underage Drinking will serve as both a game plan and a call to arms for anyone with an investment in youth health and safety.

This paper presents the results of a review of hundreds of hours of testimony before State legislatures, large amounts of editorial opinion and voluminous research reports in an effort to distill the most commonly heard arguments against the 21 year old drinking age. Many of these arguments are myths or misperceptions of fact. Some are outright fictions. Some are sincere concerns for rights and liberties that are no less valid simply because they compete with other, equally valid rights. All are views strongly held by many people, the vast majority of whom are honestly motivated by and interested in the freedom and well being of young Americans. Those who see the drinking age 21 as an essential step toward preserving that freedom and well being need to treat their opponents and their arguments with respect. Legitimate concerns and sincere questions deserve respectful, logical responses.

Rorabaugh has written a well thought out and intriguing social history of Americas great alcoholic binge that occurred between 1790 and 1830, what he terms a key formative period in our history....A pioneering work that illuminates a part of our heritage that can no longer be neglected in future studies of Americas social fabric. A bold and frequently illuminating attempt to investigate the relationship of a single social custom to the central features of our historical experience....A book which always asks interesting questions and provides many provocative answers.

Countless authors, historians, journalists, and screenwriters have written about the prohibition era, an age of jazz and speakeasies, gangsters and bootleggers. But only a few have explored what happened when governments turned the taps back on. Dan Malleck shifts the focus to Ontario following repeal of the Ontario Temperance Act, an age when the government struggled to please both the “wets” and the “drys,” the latter a powerful lobby that continued to believe that alcohol consumption posed a terrible social danger. Malleck’s investigation of regulation in six diverse communities reveals that rather than only pandering to temperance forces, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario sought to define and promote manageable drinking spaces in which citizens would learn to follow the rules of proper drinking and foster self-control. The regulation of liquor consumption was a remarkable bureaucratic balancing act between temperance and its detractors but equally between governance and its ideal drinker.