<p>I think you are correct that I do look at these matters to some extent through the lens of addiction, in the sense that I do believe in addressing every related red flag (even though most of them turn out to be nothing). Early onset addiction is so very insidious that it is not unlike a most serious form of cancer in terms of prognosis. I always figure it cannot hurt to rule it out (as much as that is possible). I try at every step to stress that most of these situations turn out to be nothing, and I do it repeatedly, but I think that this topic is jolting enough to cause people to disregard those qualifiers. I am not seeing addiction everywhere, but it is true that I am talking about it a heck of a lot.</p>
<p>The point you made about making the drinking age earlier was interesting (with respect to type I and type II alcoholics). It was well said and so it made me consider it. I still think, though, that there is good science behind the idea that the later you start drinking alcohol, the less of a chance you’ll have a problem with it. So I guess that leads us back to whether or not an older drinking age is a deterrent. I really believe it is.</p>
<p>I completey respect your opinion on this, actually. I don’t, at all, disagree with the fact that when some substance begins to make your life unmanagable, it should be diagnosed. Had we been speaking with the parent of the kid who was suspended? I might have seen the story differently.</p>
<p>I don’t think the jury is “out” on the drinking age issue. I think, to some extent, it’s the ubiquitious “correlation does not necessarily indicate causation” argument, in that those who are predisposed to early onset alcoholism are going to drink more and more quickly anyway, so I’m not sure if that is a cause or a symptom? I tend to think it is a symptom, but as you pointed out, the research is sparse.</p>
<p>Anyway, reasonable, informed minds can obviously disagree on this. And do.</p>
<p>Spidey, I did not mean to attack you, just reflect on possible biases.</p>
<p>If all we look at is statistics without analysis, then we would conclude that raising the drinking age has resulted in more bing drinking.</p>
<p>And Spidey, you’re calling me a bully? Hahaha. After you kicked a woman when she was down. Yes, you had every right to express your opinions. But the ones that were not time sensitive could have waited, or you could have started another thread.</p>
<p>You keep criticizing others for “veering” off topic, but you seem to want to address problems that OPs son has not been shown to have.</p>
<p>This is somewhat off the initial topic but on the merits of the drinking age being of 21, I personally would agree with it. </p>
<p>When the limit is 21 you get kids of 18/19 trying it out but when the limit is 18 you have kids as young as 15/16 starting to drink. I’m from the UK and when my D goes on her facebook page to look up friends from the UK there are a lot of them with pictures obviously in pubs and clubs and they look completely drunk. These pictures are from when they are 16 or younger. There is a difference between having the odd beer watching a football game or a glass of wine with your meal to the culture that exists in the UK with drink. The object seems to be how much can they consume in one evening. Even in other parts of Europe for instance Italy and France, drinking is part of growing up and they seem to view it in a much more relaxed way than kids in the UK.</p>
<p>Just another reason why we like living in the US.</p>
<p>So many assumptions! I’ll try to address the more pertinent ones.</p>
<p>I was being facetious when I asked about which Universities would ensure that there would be no “association with drug users” (pot smokers). I am not the least bit concerned that my son is associating with kids who smoke pot. He’s not a follower and we have faith that he makes his own choices and will use his good judgment. If I was that afraid of him being easily influenced by kids who smoked pot or drank then I would have homeschooled him and not sent him to public or private HS where both are fairly common, but I’m not.</p>
<p>There is no way on earth I would ever consider sending my son to a school like BYU or other zero tolerance type of institution.</p>
<p>Second, my husband and I are in 100% agreement. He also was concerned about whether our sons rights were violated and HE was the one who questioned the Dean about it, not I.</p>
<p>Third, regarding the schools response to the fake ID, I should have been more clear. They do not require drug counseling but a class in alcohol awareness. I don’t consider this to be comparable to getting my son drug counseling, which I think would be a totally inappropriate response to his having a fake ID. Neither one of us has any concerns about him becoming a drug addict or alcoholic. </p>
<p>Regarding the search of the room - my husband and I both still disagree with the schools choice to search my sons belongings, but we NOW understand that they have the right to do so (and BTW, we can afford to contest it, but it would be pointless, we likely wouldn’t win) so that’s that. </p>
<p>Both my husband and I are satisfied that my son has learned an important lesson and will act accordingly without us resorting to becoming prison wardens. </p>
<p>The reason I brought up my friend whose overreaction to the discovery of her son smoking pot, was because when she told me about it, I cautioned her that she should be careful not to label her son as someone with a problem. I’m convinced that if she had not taken such drastic steps as drug testing her son and putting him into drug counseling that he would have been better off. It’s obvious now that doing what some posters have suggested (drug testing and counseling because a RM was caught smoking pot? Seriously?) certainly didn’t help.</p>
<p>“csfmap-- I think the binary division of parents, as if all of us see kids as a victim OR see them as guilty, is maybe a little simplistic compared to the issue. Spidey is an addiction’s specialist and sees through those lenses. (If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)”</p>
<p>Neither my husband nor I see our son as a victim. Just because we both want to make sure that our sons rights were not infringed upon does not mean we perceive him as a victim. One has nothing to do with the other.</p>
<p>Nope, no matter what the limit is you have kids as young as 15/16 starting to drink. When I was in HS, there was very little drinking. The legal age changed from 21 to 18 my senior year. When my son was in HS, the legal age was 21, and binge drinking was quite common. Kids were being tested and thrown out of school dances on a regular basis. Kids were taken to the hospital with alcohol posoning. I literally NEVER heard of this happening when I was in HS. The drinking at my son’s HS seemed to be associated more strongly with some athletic teams, notably hockey, soccer, skiing, and perhaps the nascent football group. (S did not drink and looked down on those who did.)</p>
<p>One thing I noticed was that when my state changed the drinking age back to 21, bags of empty beer cans and bottles immediately started appearing along the roadsides in wooded areas. Obviously the kids were now drinking while riding around in cars. Not an improvement, IMHO.</p>
<p>The number of deaths attributed to underage drinking has been reduced by changing the drinking age to age 18. If you look at Mini’s post, he has a site that has some (literally) sobering statistics. There is a decrease in underage drinking when the age is reduced. There are those who do obey the law, and those who do not tend to be more conservative and careful when they do. </p>
<p>The big question is whether that is the point to draw the line. For consistency’s sake, I feel the age should be 21 or 18 for everything unless certain wide exceptions are made. It seems insane to me that a couple can be married with kids, a car, in the military, with bills and contracts up the whazooie and they can’t buy a bottle of wine for dinner or have some beers. Ridiculous, in my opinion. But I do have want all to know that the stats are out there and there are improvements in mortality rates.</p>
<p>So I dont know if we can reach a conclusion as to what is causing reduction. Also, do you support Prohibition? Wouldnt that reduce even more fatalities?</p>
<p>When multiple goals conflict, we consider each goal. We don’t put one single goal above all others. Here, we consider both freedom and safety.</p>
<p>In this situation, lawmakers have determined that the number of lives saved, and injuries avoided, on the road more than offset the loss of freedom involved in restricting drinking to age 21 and above. Lawmakers also have determined that the number of lives saved, and injuries avoided, by potentially banning drinking altogether do not offset the loss of freedom that would be involved.</p>
<p>Having an illogical situation where you are a legal adult at 18, but a 21 drinking age results in a general disrepect/contempt for the law by our young adults. Even worse, we are conditioning young adults to accept that “unjust”, “immoral” or “illogical” laws can and should be enacted in a democracy. </p>
<p>With the internet its a different world. Kids today can figure out in a couple of key strokes, if they don’t know from personal travel, that the U.S. is the only country in western civilization with a 21 drinking age - 30 years ago, this information wasn’t readily available. </p>
<p>I know several students that have made a “run for the border”. At first I was a little surprised until one of them said they were no different than an escaped slave during the mid 1800’s - they need to go where they have the rights of a “freeman” - Canada. Maybe a little overstated, but I can understand their reasoning. And as a parent, it would be nice not to have to worry about MIP drinking charges and fake ID’s.</p>
<p>Actually, NONE of these things happened at the same time. When the laws were adopted, there were immediate reductions in drunk driver fatalities, and injury accidents, even in comparing neighboring communities, where one community had the new drinking age, and one did not. </p>
<p>Raising the drinking age saved thousands of lives, and tens of thousands of serious injury accidents. It also resulted in fewer people (who already had a genetic propensity) from experiencing serious alcohol problems/alcoholism later in life. It was one of the most effective public health interventions of the late 20th Century.</p>
<p>(And, yes, youth drinking rates, and binge drinking rates, are now MUCH lower than they were in the early 1980s. You can get data on those rates from the Monitoring the Future surveys, which have been ongoing since 1975.)</p>
<p>Mini, I am not certain how they get the numbers on binge drinking, but has it occurred to you that some kids wont answer surverys etc, if something is illegal? Any cites on binge drinking among COLLEGE KIDS? Cuz all I found with MTF was HS kids? Any cites to increased penalties for drunk driving (years changed) and change to 21 for drinking?</p>
<p>Here’s a cite that says that teen drunk driving fatalities is more related to the number of teens of that age in any one year. More kids, more accidents, less kids, less accidents. </p>
<p>“It also resulted in fewer people (who already had a genetic propensity) from experiencing serious alcohol problems/alcoholism later in life.”</p>
<p>We actually have EXCELLENT studies (published in JAMA) on rates of alcoholism/serious alcohol problems relative to age of first use, and some specifically on genetic propensity (where the largest difference apparently is whether you started drinking before age 12). </p>
<p>I am not going off Youth Initiative numbers (in fact, I don’t even know what those are, and I do this this - planning around prevention and treatment - professionally).</p>
<p>“Mini, I am not certain how they get the numbers on binge drinking, but has it occurred to you that some kids wont answer surverys etc, if something is illegal?”</p>
<p>Actually, that hypothesis has been well-tested, and is part of every sound survey methodology. The only place where studies have not been able to provide adequate case controls for lying, not answering, etc., is in drugs involving the use of syringes (from what we can tell, we generally underestimate those by a factor of 3 or more).</p>
<p>I’m trying to understand what you are saying, since the drinking age decrease hasn’t caused a decrease in alcohol abuse or dependence among adults. </p>
<p>I’m not really that invested in this, but people are giving out misleading information. If the reason is traffic fatalities? I’ll buy it. If the reason is a decrease in the frequency of addiction? It’s not true. </p>
<p>That is not to say that the traffic fatalities cannot be a good enough reason, just that we don’t need to act as if the drinking age being raised is going to “save” people from the disease of addiction. It won’t, which is no reason for any law to exist anyway. It’s hardly as if illegality has ever deterred an addict anyway. </p>
<p>But, we are far afield, and I must get to work.</p>
<p>“Heavy drinking during the teen years can exact a toll that lasts long after the buzz wears off,” says Dr. Aaron White of the Duke University Medical Center. Researchers like White say studies now confirm that the delicate, developing teenage brain is much more susceptible than the adult brain to the toxic effects of alcohol. “The brain is developing during adolescence,” White says. “Whenever a brain is developing, it’s vulnerable to the disruptive effects of alcohol. Pregnant women don’t drink for that reason.”</p>
<p>It might not be conclusive, but research does give cause for concern about teenage drinking. Driving fatalities are not the only reason teens shouldn’t be drinking; although it’s a good reason. Eighteen year-olds have only two years of driving experience which contributes to a higher rate of accidents even when they are sober.</p>
<p>“we don’t need to act as if the drinking age being raised is going to “save” people from the disease of addiction”</p>
<p>Is “addiction” the only issue? Hard to see the benefit of kids drinking more at an earlier age (even id they don’t become alcoholics) - -and consuming even larger quantities of alcohol over their life-times. Then, instead of 21 yr olds buying getting alcohol for 18 yr olds, you have 18 yr olds in hs buying alcohol for 15 yr olds. (especially in an effort to get vulnerable young girls “loose up.”)</p>