Do you remember your first taste of alcohol? How old were you? Twenty-one? All 50 states currently demand that their citizens reach age 21 before they can legally drink. But there's a growing movement that says mandatory minimum laws may do more harm than good. When determining the right date when a young person can take one of their final steps towards personal responsibility and freedom, what's the right answer?
The consumption of alcohol by Americans under the legal drinking age is common and widespread. Yet few of the young people who choose to drink underage give more than a passing acknowledgment to the fact that each time they open a beer or mix a drink they are committing a crime. By banning an entire group of young adults from engaging in a behavior that is universally understood as a symbol of adulthood, the 21 year-old drinking age fosters rampant violation of and disrespect for law—one study estimates that only two in every 1,000 instances of underage drinking results in arrest or citation. How many more dollars, and how much more manpower, will be required to make enforcement effective? What would be the real cost, and not just in dollars, of merely doubling or tripling the arrest and citation rate—and bringing that rate to 4 or 6 out of every 1,000 violators? In many ways the climate surrounding the 21 year-old drinking age is analogous to that during Prohibition in the 1920s—it is easy to see the culture of speakeasies, rum runners and bathtub gin mirrored in the keg parties, pre-gaming, and beer pong of today.
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