<p>“Far fewer high school youth drink today than did 25 years ago, and there are far fewer drinking and driving accidents among teenagers.”</p>
<p>Yes, but as was mentioned, this is due to the raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21. It fell sharply in the 90s and is now levelling off, i.e. it has already fallen as far as it is going to.</p>
<p>Of course blatant abuses should be punished (if you have 50 people over and you can hear the party a block away, you deserve to be raided!) and drunk driving/binge drinking should not be tolerated. But trying to completely end it will do more to alienate teens than actually stop it completely. If you let your teen go to parties, trust me, there’s going to be alcohol at some of them whether you call the parents or not. If you don’t, all I can say is guess what’s going to happen in college.</p>
<p>I didn’t really mind the underage drinking laws actually–enforcement is slim to nonexistent if you don’t do anything stupid.</p>
<p>Edit: Underage drinking and murder? Come on. With the exception of drunk driving, underage drinking only harms the people doing it. The idea shouldn’t be to punish, it should be to prevent it from getting out of hand (you can argue that it happening at all is it getting out of hand because it is illegal, but face it, it’s not a realistic goal to end it completely). Trying to completely stamp it out won’t get you any farther than abstinence-only education.</p>