A number of US states are considering legislation to lower the legal drinking age from the current standard of 21 — if only to allow troops coming home from Iraq to drink.
The move would defy a generation of federal law and public opinion, which is strongly opposed to lowering the drinking age. In 1984 Congress set a uniform legal age of 21, threatening to cut highway funding to states which did not comply.
Despite the risk of penalties, however, seven US states are exploring lowering the drinking age — partly for under-age (in terms of the drink laws) Iraq War vets and more broadly in recognition that teenagers are going to drink anyway.
“If you can take a shot on the battlefield you ought to be able to take a shot of beer legally,” said Fletcher Smith, who has sponsored legislation to lower the drinking age in South Carolina.
Kentucky, Wisconsin, and South Carolina have introduced legislation to lower the drinking age for troops to 18.
LOW-ALCOHOL BEER
Four other states — Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, and most recently Vermont — would extend the privilege to the general population. However, South Dakota would only allow 18 to 20 year-olds to buy low-alcohol beer. Advocates of a lower drinking age argue that teenagers are drinking, and that the secrecy encourages binge drinking among young people.
“Our laws aren’t working. They’re not preventing underage drinking. What they’re doing is putting it outside the public eye,” Hinda Miller, a Vermont state senator, told reporters on Thursday, after a committee took up her bill to study lowering the drinking age.
TROUBLE
“So you have a lot of kids binge drinking. They get sick, they get scared and they get into trouble and they can’t call because they know it’s illegal,” she said.
While the move would be popular with college students and other young people obliged to pay for fake ID if they want a night on the town, there is concerted opposition to lowering the US’ drinking age.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other pressure groups say raising the drinking age a generation ago has cut traffic related deaths among young people by 13 percent.
States that do lower their drinking age would also pay a heavy penalty under current legislation that would require them to forfeit 10 percent of their highway fund from the federal government.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS