MOTION #42: THIS HOUSE WOULD LOWER THE DRINKING AGE

Alcohol has been part of the culture of recreation for thousands of years, It is also a dangerous substance. As such, almost all countries place an age restriction on it. The few exceptions where there is no minimum drinking age include Albania, Vietnam and Cambodia. While the US and UK have comparatively high drinking ages of 21 and 18 respectively, some European countries allow drinking at a younger age; usually around 16 (at least for beer, if not for spirits). The purpose of a minimum drinking age is to act as a deterrent from drinking alcohol, as young people face legal punishment if they break the law by drinking underage. Supposedly, this deterrent helps to preserve the overall health and safety of young people until they reach an age where they are considered responsible enough to regulate their own drinking.    However, underage drinking remains a problem. The law is often difficult to enforce if people drink in their own homes, rather than in a public place. Though establishments such as bars or supermarkets often have a policy to ask for identification when selling alcohol in the UK, levels of sales to minors are still not considered to be low enough. So far, the minimum drinking age in the UK and the US has failed to stop some minors from obtaining alcohol.

The mechanism for this debate is simple: passing a law to change the legal drinking age. For the US, this could be changing from 21 to 18; for the UK, from 18 to 16; for other European countries, considering that 18 is now a common drinking age, 16 would also be suitable here. In any of these particular settings, the principle arguments remain the same.

The proposition might also choose to tie in extra conditions to the mechanism, for example raising tax on harder forms of alcohol like spirits, or on youth-targeted alcoholic drinks like alcopops, to deter excessive drinking by young people after the law is passed. Studies have also found that higher taxes on alcohol can noticeably reduce the number of accidents and violent incidents. Another mechanism tie-in would be to state that tax money gained from the sale of alcohol to young people who can now legally drink will be funded back into educational schemes to promote responsible drinking, or in worst case to cover the costs of medical treatment or criminal damage committed. It may be useful to point out the analogy to smoking. Though smoking results in a lot of medical conditions (and a hefty economic strain on the NHS in the UK), the tax money from cigarettes ‘more than pays for’ the cost of healthcare for people who get cancer from smoking.

Pros	Cons
A high drinking age makes alcohol even more attractive to minors. By imposing a high drinking age in the US and the UK, illegal drinking is seen as even more attractive because it is exclusive. For many teenagers, underage drinking is seen as a way to gain respect from their peers and appear ‘cool’, or to feel ‘more at ease in social situations’. The very fact that it is illegal makes it a target for teenagers to gain social status by drinking, as is true for other illegal substances such as marijuana. Because it is harder to get, when young people do manage to obtain alcohol they tend to have high rates of binge-drinking. Lowering the drinking age would remove this illicit appeal and encourage people to drink more moderately when they do drink.	Lowering the drinking age in other countries has actually shown to increase the amount of binge drinking. For example, in New Zealand ‘lowering the legal drinking age from 20 to 18 is reported to have resulted in a sharp increase in binge drinking among teenagers and young adults’. Even in other countries where the drinking age is comparatively low – like 16 in Italy - there is a rise in binge drinking rates. In 1996, 19,000 alcoholics were receiving regular treatment in Italy. By 2007, this had risen to 54,000. Italy has also found need to address the problem of underage drinking by tightening its laws; this is proof that, no matter how low the drinking age is, there will almost always be a problem with underage drinkers. If these young people are already using alcohol irresponsibly, making it easily-accessible is not necessarily the solution. They have already shown in numerous studies and statistics that their attitudes towards alcohol are not only irresponsible, leading to ‘a disproportionate volume of crime’, but dangerous, increasing health risks to young individuals where the taxpayer must finance their medical treatment. Alternative measures, such as increasing alcohol awareness and education.
Lowering the age limit would create healthier long-term drinking habits. If the drinking age were lowered, the perceived ‘need’ to binge drink would be removed too. A 2009 survey showed that, in the US, there was a higher rate of binge drinking among high school students (41.8%) who reported current alcohol use than among adults where, even in high-risk categories, binge-drinking rates did not rise above 25.6%. Limited alcohol consumption can actually be beneficial for a person’s health, and is linked to ‘a lower risk of coronary heart disease in healthy men and women’. The drinking age should be lowered to remove the glamorisation of alcohol and resultant binge drinking, and instead focus on frequent but moderate alcohol consumption.	The fact that adults do continue to binge-drink disproves the idea that lowering the drinking age would automatically remove the desire to binge drink. The problems which inspired the need for a legal drinking age were not so much those who consumed small amounts which have been linked to health benefits; rather, the law is in place to stop copious and irresponsible drinking which results in rising tax costs for medical care or criminal damage. The drinking age predominantly tackles cases where young people would drink large volumes of alcohol, leading to health and social problems. In these cases, there is little reason to believe that a change in the law would immediately change peoples’ attitudes to alcohol; in a bad scenario, such as New Zealand experienced, binge drinking could in fact rise.
Young people should have the right to choose. While the current drinking age is 18 in the UK and 21 in the US, both countries grant other legal rights to people below this age. For example, both countries grant the right to have sex or join the army at a lower age than this. This recognition of maturity should also encompass the right to drink; if young people are responsible enough to fight for their country or have sex, they should be responsible enough to have a drink. In any case, studies show that many underage young people have tried alcohol; it is clear that the current legal restrictions do not work.	Drinking is different to other legal rights in this case because it embodies the potential for serious medical harm. Similarly, in the UK, the age to purchase cigarettes was recently raised to 18, the same as the drinking age, in recognition that it can cause medical harm. The rising number of underage binge drinkers is evidence that these people are often not responsible enough to handle alcohol reasonable. In terms of effectiveness, each government must decide whether it is better to uphold a moral or social standard which is difficult to police, or risk the lives of young people by simple legalising a lower drinking age. If the law is currently ineffective, this is reason to increase the prevalence of schemes such as Challenge 25, or train staff better to identify any underage customers, rather than resort to an easy and potentially dangerous relaxation of the law.
A high drinking age could lead young people to turn to drugs and other substances instead. Surveys at East Carolina University in the US found that when the drinking age was raised from 19 to 21, 22% of students reported that they ‘intended to use other drugs’ as drinking became illegal for people of their age. Meanwhile, in Arizona, surveys before and after the drinking age was raised from 19 to 21 found no reduction in alcohol consumption among their students. Raising the drinking age, therefore, does not necessarily mean a reduction in alcohol consumption, and more worryingly could push people towards other substances which are dangerous and difficult to regulate or police. The legal system should acknowledge high rates of underage drinking and change to reflect the reality of drinking patterns.	Evidence showing that some young people seek out other illegal, dangerous substances as a substitute hardly proves that they are responsible enough to handle alcohol at a younger age. If anything, it proves the contrary. Acknowledging the fact that people do drink underage – just as we acknowledge the fact that there are problems with people taking, and becoming addicted to, illegal drugs – doesn’t mean that governments should then legalise a pre-existing problem. Statistics show that people who drink underage are much more likely to develop long-term problems such as alcohol abuse. For example, young people who being drinking ‘before age 15 years are five times more likely to develop alcohol dependence or abuse later in life’ than those who begin drinking at age 21 or above. Current drink and drug laws should be maintained to provide a barrier or deterrent for as long as possible, and protect these individuals from serious harm.
One of the main problems with alcohol being ‘normalised’ in society is not that it normalises alcohol itself, but that it normalises illegal behaviour. If young people can drink alcohol without being legally punished for breaking the law – as often happens because it’s very hard to monitor those who drink at home – they begin to think that they are exempt from other, more serious laws. This gives them the mistaken idea that they are beyond the law and so can do exactly what they like. However, if the drinking age were lowered, then drinking among young people – especially in public areas – would be a lot easier to regulate and control. This could be the first step in reducing other crimes, as young people would be aware that they are still acting within the framework of the law.	Alcohol is a dangerous substance, and normalising it even further would be very harmful. Current levels of excessive drinking and alcohol abuse have led many studies and government bodies to claim that alcohol is becoming ‘normalised’ or is ‘utterly normalised’ and that it is seen as a ‘necessary accompaniment to social events’. Alcohol has already proven itself as a factor in violence and crime across the US, but underage drinking in the US goes hand in hand with very high rates of harms, including homicide, rape, robbery and assault – despite the supposedly ‘high’ drinking age. If the drinking age were lowered, there would be one fewer barrier to prevent these kinds of violent and criminal offences at a young age. Furthermore, for the individuals involved, the likelihood of alcohol dependency is four times more likely if they begin drinking at a young age (15), and alcohol abuse is two and a half times more likely in the US. Given that crimes resulting from underage drinking could likely end in a criminal record, and the costs of medical treatment for young people who drink excessively has risen to £1.7 billion in the UK, alcohol is obviously extremely damaging for those who are currently underage despite the fact that it is still illegal. We certainly should not be legitimising this kind of behaviour by lowering the drinking age.
Increased education (perhaps funded from the extra tax money gained by selling alcohol to these young people) could help to show examples of moderate drinking, which are very important to creating a healthy long-term drinking habit according to studies. If the drinking age is lowered and alcohol is no longer a taboo for these young people, they could more openly discuss it with their parents or teachers and gain a better understanding of alcohol before they begin drinking. This could help to stop the misuse of alcohol.	Allowing a culture of normalisation to begin at a young age prevents change in adulthood. Once a culture of excessive drinking appears to be the norm, young adults ‘find it difficult to imagine alternatives’. The concept of ‘drinking to get drunk’, often the ‘default’ choice for young people, would simply continue into adulthood without any thought of drinking responsibly or in moderation. Young people often believe that their ‘heavy episodic drinking’ is just a phase of youth, and so do not believe that it poses a ‘threat to long-term health and wellbeing’; they would have no reason to stop drinking heavily once they became adults. This brings continued health and crime problems.
Our current system clearly isn’t working. We can examine the systems in place in countries such as France to see where binge drinking began to rise there and use it to help address problems in places like the US and the UK. However, we should not let this deter us; it is more a reason to closely regulate drinking in public places such as parks and streets than to abandon it altogether.	Other countries with a lower drinking age do not have more responsible drinking. European countries where the drinking age was often 16 have begun to raise their drinking age to 18, showing that a lower drinking age still has numerous social problems. Despite assumptions that countries like France have a moderate attitude to drinking alcohol because young teenagers were allowed wine with meals, binge drinking rates have soared, and the number of children under 15 years who are treated in hospital for drunkenness increased by 50% from 2004-2008. Teenagers appear to be moving away from cohesive family units and are socialising in large groups from as early as 13. This rise in social binge drinking disproves the idea that a lower drinking age somehow creates a mature respect for alcohol, and in fact highlights the difficulties faces by other countries when they try to grant this liberty to young people.