No Man's Land

Soldiers in combat often designate a section of a battlefield as “no man’s land”. These places are exposed to heavy enemy fire and anyone entering them is in imminent danger because it’s almost impossible to provide enough cover to protect them. No one wants to step into no man’s land.

For some reason, we’ve decided to force all young adults in the United States to step into no man’s land on their 18th birthday. That’s when we declare them to be adults. They can leave home; drop out of school; sign contracts; vote; make their medical care decisions; rent porn; buy cigarettes and condoms; have sex, with or without condoms; get married; become parents, with or without getting married; join the military; and, here comes the kicker, they can die in combat in defense of their country. They can do everything – with one glaring exception. They can’t drink demon rum or anything else with ethyl alcohol in it.

This distinction makes no sense. I’m not necessarily advocating lowering the drinking age. I am advocating making a decision about when a young American becomes an adult and then applying that decision across the board so that we eliminate this no man’s land. I believe that our current position puts young lives at risk when they step into the minefield that lies between 18 and 21.

We send our newly minted adults off to college or into the workforce or the military when they turn 18. Then we tell them that they can’t drink for another three years. Of course, we know with a virtual certainty that, expect for the few of them who were raised in and still adhere to a religious tradition that prohibits drinking, almost all of them will be drinking before they come back home for Thanksgiving dinner. Most of them were drinking frequently well before they tossed their tassel at high school graduation. Nonetheless, we expose our young people to criminal liability for the possession or consumption of alcohol, not to mention exposing their older friends to the crime of providing alcohol to someone “under age”.

More importantly, we send them away from home and tell them to begin making a full array of adult decisions while reserving this one taboo. The result is obvious: we force them to rebel against the lone restraint, and their rebellion is often to an artificial extreme because they approach drinking with an “I’ll-do-whatever-I-damn-well-please-to-hell-with-you” attitude. We freeze them in adolescence in this one area, so they retain the adolescent chip on their shoulder in this one area.

This rant is prompted by the rhetoric around the recent decision by Duke University to suspend its men’s lacrosse team and cancel the remainder of their season due the team attending a drunken party where a woman alleges she was raped. Similarly, the Chico State women’s softball season was cancelled due to a drunken party where an underage recruit suffered alcohol poisoning. Obviously, anyone involved in a rape or in causing a 17-year old to suffer alcohol poisoning should be prosecuted and punished. My issue is around the moral indignation coming from the colleges around the subject of drinking, the rhetoric about how such instances just will not be tolerated. Yeah, right. What they mean is that underage drinking will be tolerated as it has always been tolerated, unless and until something bad happens. No one should declare that they’re not going to tolerate rape or alcohol poisoning; that's a given. But, to wax judgmental on the subject of underage drinking in college is disingenuous and only points out how ridiculous the existence of this no man’s land is.

With only a handful of exceptions (i.e., five), every other country in the world has set the legal drinking age at 18 or younger. Only the U.S. and Egypt have set it at 21. Apparently this is another one of those areas where we believe we’re right and everyone else in the world is wrong. Well, we’re wrong.

Several friends of mine have raised teenagers overseas where teenage drinking is allowed at 16 or 18. When their children have returned to the U.S. they're astonished at the difference in attitude among young drinkers. Their observation: in the U.K. and Europe, drinking is just drinking; in the U.S., it’s an obsession. In the U.K. and Europe, drinking is the object of drinking, and some kids get drunk; in the U.S., getting drunk is the object of drinking and almost everyone gets drunk.

Drinking is woven into the fabric of the culture in the U.K and Europe in a much different way than in the U.S. It’s not as big a deal there. Here, by setting it aside as a separate hurdle into adulthood, we’ve made it a big deal. We need to think about whether someone else has a better idea. For example, families go to an English pub for dinner and everyone over 16 can drink beer or wine legally. If young people have been able to drink legally in the presence of their family for several years before leaving home, then leaving home doesn’t become the initiatory right of passage into drinking in public or in a social setting. That’s not to say that English kids don’t have problems with drinking; they just don’t enter into it as if shot from a cannon.

I favor 18 as the age of majority and for that reason I favor 18 as the legal drinking age with it being clear that a younger person can drink legally in their home with their parents at an earlier age. I would support allowing anyone over 16 to drink wine or beer in public if they're with a parent and it’s being served with a meal. Young people need to learn how to drink responsibly, just like they need to learn how to do a host of other adult activities responsibly, and the best “on the job” teachers are their parents. If there is no meaningful opportunity to do that before a young man or woman leaves home, then that is a lost opportunity and the “learning” will come in a far different “school” – like the ones at Duke and Chico State.