<p>thedude, LOL i love that.</p>
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<p>I’d prefer a small parade… </p>
<p>I’m sharing personal knowledge, to corroborate on the point that this does in fact happen, while at the same time asking a legitimate question about the article and the reported rates of this phenomenon. At no time did I offer any boast-ful statement, nor did I expound on my experiences of my own 21st birthday.</p>
<p>If you’d like me to brag, please let me know, I’d be happy to oblige you.</p>
<p>21 shots of spirits for a guy weighing 180 pounds over five hours is roughly a .3 BAL. That’s ridiculous to drink so much.</p>
<p>We had a presentation from this group called GORD, formed after a frat-related alcohol poisoning death at the University of Colorado ([The</a> Gordie Foundation - Home](<a href=“http://gordie.org%5DThe”>http://gordie.org)). Most sobering (no pun intended) on the old web site is the [Blood</a> Alcohol Content Calculator](<a href=“http://www.gordcolorado.com/calcs.htm]Blood”>http://www.gordcolorado.com/calcs.htm). I’ve heard of the 21 shots ritual and I can’t even fathom it. For women, even without making it to the 21 shots, not only is BAC tolerance much lower, but the vulnerability to that could result in something like sexual assault is just too much.</p>
<p>In the case of Gordie Bailey, soft snoring (perhaps like the kind paying3tuitions mentioned of Jesse’s case) was actually an indication of his dangerously slow breathing.</p>
<p>I think the saddest thing about stories about any alcohol-related deaths is that people are so used to their friends passing out, they hesitate to stop or call for help. The victim is left to sleep it off. In any other situation, passing out would be an obvious sign of danger. How is it tolerable now?</p>
<p>All you parents need to calm down. As long as your child isn’t stupid and decides to drive after consuming that alcohol, there will be nothing terrible that occurs besides a bad hangover.</p>
<p>Look, for me it’s not just about the ritual or proving a point to my buddies. I plan to make my 21st birthday an example of silent protest and civil disobedience of the unfair underage drinking limit imposed on the American youth by the government. I can vote, smoke, be sent off to die for my country in war before I’m 21 but I can’t have a beer?</p>
<p>This ritual is important because we need to show even at the age of 21, one can be irresponsible in America. Age has no bearing on your maturity after you become a legal adult. Instead of preaching responsibility to their children at a young age, overprotective moms like the ones on this forum resorted to forcing the government to increase the legal drinking age to 21 several decades back just because of some reckless teenagers who chose to drink and drive.</p>
<p>Most lightweight guys and basically all girls will blackout before they even get to 21 shots so it’s not that big of a deal. The worst risk you face is having to get your stomach pumped in a hospital which although is distressing, it’s a small price to pay to send across an important political message and at the same time have a night of glory you won’t soon forget.</p>
<p>"It’s been 20 years that America has had a minimum federal drinking age. The policy began to gain momentum in the early 1980s, when the increasingly influential Mothers Against Drunk Driving added the federal minimum drinking age to its legislative agenda. By 1984, it had won over a majority of the Congress.</p>
<p>President Reagan initially opposed the law on federalism grounds but eventually was persuaded by his transportation secretary at the time, now-Sen. Elizabeth Dole.</p>
<p>Over the next three years every state had to choose between adopting the standard or forgoing federal highway funding; most complied. A few held out until the deadline, including Vermont, which fought the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (and lost).</p>
<p>Twenty years later, the drawbacks of the legislation are the same as they were when it was passed.</p>
<p>The first is that the age set by the legislation is basically arbitrary. The U.S. has the highest drinking age in the world (a title it shares with Indonesia, Mongolia, Palau). The vast majority of the rest of the world sets the minimum age at 17 or 16 or has no minimum age at all.</p>
<p>Supporters of the federal minimum argue that the human brain continues developing until at least the age of 21.</p>
<p>Alcohol expert Dr. David Hanson of the State University of New York at Potsdam argues such
assertions reek of junk science. They’re extrapolated from a study on lab mice, he explains, as well as from a small sample of actual humans already dependent on alcohol or drugs. Neither is enough to make broad proclamations about the entire population.</p>
<p>If the research on brain development is true, the U.S. seems to be the only country to have caught on to it.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, high school students in much of the rest of the developed world — where lower drinking ages and laxer enforcement reign — do considerably better than U.S. students on standardized tests.</p>
<p>The second drawback of the federal drinking age is that it set the stage for tying federal mandates to highway funds, enabling Congress to meddle in all sorts of state and local affairs it has no business attempting to regulate — so long as it can make a tortured argument about highway safety.</p>
<p>Efforts to set national speed limits, seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws and set a national blood-alcohol standard for DWI cases have rested on the premise that the federal government can blackmail the states with threats to cut off funding.</p>
<p>The final drawback is pretty straightforward: It makes little sense that America considers an 18-year-old mature enough to marry, to sign a contract, to vote and to fight and die for his country, but not mature enough to decide whether or not to have a beer.</p>
<p>So for all of those drawbacks, has the law worked? Supporters seem to think so. Their primary argument is the dramatic drop in the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities since the minimum age first passed Congress in 1984. They also cite relative drops in the percentage of underage drinkers before and after the law went into effect.</p>
<p>But a new chorus is emerging to challenge the conventional wisdom. The most vocal of these critics is John McCardell Jr., the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont. McCardell’s experience in higher education revealed to him that the federal age simply wasn’t working.</p>
<p>It may have negligibly reduced total underage consumption, but those who did consume were much more likely to do so behind closed doors and to drink to excess in the short time they had access to alcohol. McCardell recently started the organization Choose Responsibility, which advocates moving the drinking age back to 18.</p>
<p>McCardell explains that the drop in highway fatalities often cited by supporters of the 21 minimum age actually began in the late 1970s, well before the federal drinking age set in.</p>
<p>What’s more, McCardell recently explained in an online chat for the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” the drop is better explained by safer and better built cars, increased seat belt use and increasing awareness of the dangers of drunken driving than in a federal standard.</p>
<p>The age at highest risk for an alcohol-related auto fatality is 21, followed by 22 and 23, an indication that delaying first exposure to alcohol until young adults are away from home may not be the best way to introduce them to drink.</p>
<p>McCardell isn’t alone. Kenyon College President S. Georgia Nugent has expressed frustration with the law, particularly in 2005 after the alcohol-related death of a Kenyon student. And former Time magazine editor and higher ed reporter Barrett Seaman echoed McCardell’s concerns in 2005.</p>
<p>The period since the 21 minimum drinking age took effect has been “marked by a shift from beer to hard liquor,” Seaman wrote in Time, “consumed not in large social settings, since that was now illegal, but furtively and dangerously in students’ residences. In my reporting at colleges around the country, I did not meet any presidents or deans who felt the 21-year age minimum helps their efforts to curb the abuse of alcohol on their campuses.”</p>
<p>The federal drinking age has become somewhat sacrosanct among public health activists, who’ve consistently relied on the accident data to quell debate over the law’s merits.</p>
<p>They’ve moved on to other battles, such as scolding parents for giving their own kids a taste of alcohol before the age of 21 or attacking the alcohol industry for advertising during sporting events or in magazines aimed at adults that are sometimes read by people under the age of 21.</p>
<p>But after 20 years, perhaps it’s time to take a second look—a sound, sober (pardon the pun), science-based look—at the law’s costs and benefits, as well as the sound philosophical objections to it.</p>
<p>McCardell provides a welcome voice in a debate too often dominated by hysterics. But beyond McCardell, Congress should really consider abandoning the federal minimum altogether, or at least the federal funding blackmail that gives it teeth.</p>
<p>State and local governments are far better at passing laws that reflect the values, morals and habits of their communities."</p>
<p>-Radley Balko, REASON MAGAZINE</p>
<p>it is not just 21 shots for 21 years… there is another club that guys aspire to called the Century Club…100 shots … I heard about it a few years ago so I forget the specifics…I think it was 100 shots of beer in 1 hr? anyway, I just remember thinking that giving something like this a “name” like “Century Club” is part of what makes it so popular/successful…</p>
<p>kids can talk a good game with a parent…and 15 minutes later be out with friends and all our cautions are history… I do not know what the right answers are…but I continue to impress on my children that I want them around for the LONG haul…never indulge sooo much in 1 evening/day that you can end your entire life… 10 shots are enough to surrender your control over what happens to you during the next 10 hours… maybe teaching kids to set their own limits so they can live another day to set new limits?</p>
<p>This is a good example of why parents should teach their kids about drinking before they go away to school, rather than pulling the ostrich maneuver that I saw a lot of folks employ with their college freshmen. Learning about drinking from other college kids is like having 16 year-olds teach 15 year-olds how to drive- yet that is the situation for a lot of college freshmen because parents are either in denial or feel too awkward to have “the talk”.</p>
<p>As far as the article: I think these people reporting that they took “21” or “25” drinks in a night are fibbing. There’s no way you’re going to keep an accurate count at that point. I lost count at 14 on my birthday.</p>
<p>Also, binge drinking is nothing new to my generation. We just grew up with the internet, facebook, and myspace, which allows us to post pictures to the entire world when we do something stupid. Woodstock didn’t have a wireless connection out in the field.</p>
<p>And on a side note: Why is Marijuana a schedule I drug according to the US government- in the same group as heroin and methamphetamine? It’s more illegal than cocaine.</p>
<p>You know, they could kill two birds with one stone, and just make marijuana legal at 21. </p>
<p>Trying to ingest 21g would fulfill the requirement of being a worthwhile test, and anyone who got even an quarter of the way to doing so wouldn’t be able to raise their hands to start their car, never mind crash it.</p>
<p>See, lower the drinking age to 18 and you’ll save the kids three drinks they otherwise would’ve had to take</p>
<p>Century Club (mentioned by maineparent) is 1 shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. Using 1.5 oz shot glasses this equals 12.5 beers in 1 hour and 40 minutes. Probably much more common, is the “Hour of Power” which is the same concept except for only an hour. This is about 7.5 beers, and puts a 150 lb male at a BAC of about 0.166 at the end.</p>
<p>It’s sad to me to see people blaming the parents for the twins death or any young person’s death due to reckless behavior for that matter. There but for the grace of God go your child or mine. I refuse to blame the parents for their child’s deaths. You can lecture your children on alcohol and safety all you want but they will do what they will do. Please do not blame the grieving parents.</p>
<p>My mom keeps saying “don’t do that 21 shots thing” and I really just want to roll my eyes every time. Duh, go to school, why would anyone do 21 shots. 3 or 4 is sufficient.</p>
<p>Just another garbage “tradition” made for people who think fun has to come in the form of self-mutilation.</p>
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<p>Horrible logic BTW.</p>
<p>Wow, I feel like this is the last thing that people should be worrying about. I did this on my 21st birthday. It was definitely a great time.</p>
<p>Whatever. High School Health Class tells you a standard Drink every hour for the average adult=no change in BAC. So, if we take this a step further, doesn’t that mean that if you are careful in the way you space out your shots-like a 2-3 shots per hour-the change to your BAC would be greatly negligible? I don’t know, ask a pre-med major.</p>
<p>mercruz: Yes, but do you have 7-10 hours to spend in a bar? Most people don’t. Also, being ridiculously drunk is (sort of sadly) part of the appeal.</p>
<p>I’ll probably be doing something like this when I turn 19 (drinking age in my province). It’s fun, amusing and a tradition. That, and I’m a very big guy with a very high genetic alcohol tolerance, so it’s not as tough for me. Stupid though? Certainly. That’s just life I guess.</p>
<p>got to have a little fun 
Well, make a night of it then or increase the ratios, if you want to get smashed or appear to be smashed.</p>
<p>Among my friends, we like to split a person’s age among a group of people. That way, we have, at most, four or five shots apiece. Still fun, but far less dangerous.</p>
<p>I’m already making plans for my 50th birthday :D</p>