Is the American public largely supportive of 21 being the legal drinking age ?

27 comments

1. A lot of people under 21 are passionate about changing the drinking age. Majority of people over the age of 21 don’t care about the drinking age.

2. Some people think it’s strange that you can vote and die for your country in the military before you can legally drink

3. It was put in place with the goal of reducing deaths from drunk driving and my understanding is that it actually worked pretty well, which is a good thing; I personally don’t have a problem with the restriction but can’t speak for all Americans.

4. I’m generally in favor of keeping it at 21, mostly because I just don’t care enough to change it.

   When you’re in high school or college (*especially* college), it’s fairly easy to get your hands on enough booze to get you through the weekend. You think it’s BS that you can’t buy it yourself, but then when you get older you realize “ehhhhh yeah it’s probably a good thing that we couldn’t buy it ourselves at that age”

5. I’m certainly not opposed to lowering the drinking age, I just don’t want a bunch of college age drinkers suddenly pouring into my regular bars. You guys are wild, and it’s nice to just sit back and relax and without fights and drama breaking out every 15 minutes.

6. I think you’re going to find wildly different opinions on this.

   One thing that makes common US practice different from Europe is many (most?) families don’t have wine at the dinner table regularly at all, definitely not nightly/almost nightly. The culture of alcohol is that it is more thing of going out or hosting a party, with the “let the good times roll” attitude rather than a “hey this is a normal beverage to have with a nice meal” attitude. For that reason, the kind of early exposure you mention doesn’t happen for most kids, and they grow up associating drinking alcohol with having a fun night and not just a part of a meal. As such, they tend to have most or all of their underage exposure to alcohol in the form of illicit parties that promote more binge drinking type of behavior and the bad choices that go with that.

   So rather than focus on age to buy, I think the focus should be on the overall drinking culture differences

7. There is very little in the way of a drive to lower the drinking age. It’s the sort of thing that while a large number of younger people drinking, most people agree they shouldn’t be.

8. I think it’s dumb but I also stopped caring about it the second I turned 21. I would guess most people feel similarly? At any rate it isn’t that hard to get booze if you’re underage.

9. Yes.

   Between the stats speaking for themselves when it comes to DUI fatalities before and after raising the age to 21 and not having to deal with kids shitting up bars, most of us who aren’t under 21 support keeping it at 21.

10. Giving a 5-7 year old alcohol is child abuse

11. >what rationale is used to justify denying the sale of alcohol to legal adults

    We have a car-heavy culture, so having a bunch more drunk drivers (especially when teenagers don’t know their own limits and have a lower baseline of good judgement) just led to more traffic deaths, and raising the drinking age to 21 drastically reduced them.

12. When I was younger than 18 I wanted it to be 21, now that I’m over 21 I don’t really care too much.

    However, it is odd that we can entrust people who are under 21 with multi-million dollar military equipment (the enlistment age is 18, plus registering for the draft) but can’t trust them to drink responsibly.

13. The biggest factor is that once you turn 21 and it’s no longer an issue, you stop caring. People under 21 who want to drink are going to find ways to do it anyway, but I think there’s something to be said for not putting more alcohol in the hands of college kids. Definitely one of those things that I understood the reasoning of better with age.

14. I don’t really care. I think people overestimate the value put on drinking alcohol.

15. I think there needs to be a buffer between the drinking age and driving age. Since we let people drive at 16, it makes sense the drinking age should be older.

16. Most European countries have much worse alcoholism issues than America and comparable drunk driving morbidity and mortality despite less driving.

17. 18 seems to work in most of the world, so it does seem a bit odd to have it so high here. Maybe if kids first drank around parents/family, and it weren’t this forbidden fruit, we’d see less binge drinking on college campuses.

18. Americans have a car centric culture. Last time the drinking age was 18 in America, youth fatalities from drinking and driving skyrocketed. One reason for this was some state kept 21 as the drinking age while others lowered it. So you had 18 year olds driving across state lines, getting hammered at a bar, and drunk driving home

19. I’m over 21. I don’t see a reason to change the drinking age. When I was 20, I thought it was bogus but I got over it.

    I really hope that’s not true that children are having “sips” of alcohol in elementary school.

    I was on vacation this summer in a country where the drinking age was 16 or 17 and that was not the party environment I wanted to be in as a 30 year old.

20. I don’t think anyone cares enough about the drinking age, we don’t need to do everything Europeans do.

21. The reason there is no traction to change it is because NO politician wants to have their face plastered across the media as the reason some drunk 18 year old wrapped their car around a pole and killed four people the day after the ink dries on the new laws.

    This isn’t to say that doesn’t already happen anyway, but it is how it will play in the media in this not so hypothetical example.

22. Nobody really cares. The thing about this issue is that there’s a time limit to how you feel about it. It’s a very, very low priority for people once it no longer applies to them.

    > is opinion changing

    No, I haven’t seen much momentum towards changing this. Again, it’s tough to maintain momentum on an issue when pretty much only 18- to 20-year-olds have any stake in it.

    > what rationale is used to justify denying the sale of alcohol to legal adults

    My personal opinion is that, as you note, people a couple of years younger than the legal limit are going to drink anyway. I don’t have a problem with 18-year-olds drinking, but I *do* have a problem with 14- or 15-year-olds drinking. (One thing I vividly remember from several trips to Europe is seeing constant news reports about drunk teenagers causing issues.)

23. Yes, when it’s been tried in the past young adult alcohol related deaths have gone up.

24. We prioritize young people learning to drive over being allowed to drink because driving is an essential and necessary life skill in most of the country. Delaying the drinking age gives kids more time driving with less access to the deadly combination of a vehicle and alcohol.

    Also, in many states, the age to *buy* alcohol and drink it unsupervised is 21, but there are fewer (or no) restrictions on being able to drink alcohol at younger ages under adult supervision.

    So yeah, we’re mostly fine with it.

    Also, no one wants children in bars.

25. People over 21 are, in my experience, either don’t care at all or don’t care enough to want politicians to spend their political capital on legislation.

    People most affected either can’t vote or don’t vote so politicians are unlikely to have a constituency who cares about lowering the age.

    Me personally, I think it would be fine to lower it but we do also have to acknowledge that drunk driving in teenagers is still somewhat prevalent and there is a high correlation between crashes resulting in fatalities and drunk driving particularly in teenagers.

26. Most people don’t care tbh

27. Im supportive of it.

    Drunk 18, 19, and 20 year olds are dumbasses.