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Wednesday, August 20. 2008
The Age of Reason
Ever hear of the Amethyst Initiative? It’s a movement started by 100 or so college officials to hopefully lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. They’ve created this organization to start a dialogue about lowering the national drinking age, which was mandated by the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act. States that did not raise their legal drinking age to 21 were penalized 10% of their federal highway funds. So, all the states with lower drinking ages switched to keep the federal dollars.As has been proven over the past 24 years, raising the drinking age to 21 hasn’t reduced teenage drinking or deaths due to underage drinking. What the statistics do show is that since 1984, binge drinking, especially at colleges, has gone up. Worse yet, the binge drinking usually doesn’t happen on campus, it takes place most often at private residences where the participants don’t have to worry about the intruding eye of authority and the long arm of the law. Unless it gets out of hand and the neighbors call the police at 3 a.m.
Teenagers die of alcohol poisoning. As a recovering alcoholic myself, the idea that one can drink too much alcohol seems … “really?” See, for we professional drinkers, we inhale copious amounts of alcohol, black out, pass out and then get up and do it all over again. Slamming a half-gallon of cheap beer through a beer bong? Gimme a break! Amateurs …
You know someone is an alcoholic if they don’t like going to big parties on New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween. Those are the Amateur Nights when those who don’t know how to handle the drink get all the cops out on the road making it difficult for we professionals to travel safely.
As if we professionals handle it any better, but we’re pretty damn arrogant about it anyway!
I still don’t like going out on those occasions. The amateurs and professionals alike make those dangerous times to be out on the roads. Hell, even the drunks on foot can be a danger. Ever see the photos of the guy who passed out on train tracks? I’ll spare the header jokes.
Fourth of July is a different story altogether. While on the bus I overheard two drunks, heading down to a DUI class, talking about how they “got over” on the police on the Fourth by leaving the Mission Bay-Mission Beach area before the fireworks were over. In their wobbly logic, they beat the rush of inebriates who would be easy pickings for the various law enforcement agencies out looking for drunk drivers.
So, to die of alcohol poisoning, for us who made a career out of being inebriated, just seems impossible, or at least unlikely. The legal limit for alcohol blood levels is .08 %. Everyone knows that. For we pros, that’s like … nothing! We’ve had .1% and higher, nearly every time we were drinking, which, for most alcoholics, is every day.But that is not like the binge drinking of college age students. On a dare or a bet or just plain old peer pressure, a young person will slam an incredibly stupid amount of alcohol in the span of a minute or less — often with the aid of a device called a “beer bong” — and then, off they go to puke and pass out. If they don’t puke before passing out, they could vomit and choke on their own puke, or even just die because their heart and lungs stopped working. Alcohol slows the involuntary nerve functions like breathing and the beat of the heart.
The irony is that with the first rush of alcohol into the blood system, the heart beat actually speeds up! Which is why, after my first myocardial infarction, the cardiologist told me to never drink alcohol. Well, I wasn’t drinking then, but I remember him smiling as he told me that bit of information.
There’s actually a web site that lets you rate beer bongs and beer bong photos. Here.
That’s what has the college presidents and chancellors concerned. Their students not only get injured or killed in traffic accidents, a large number are dying from alcohol poisoning.
Part of the problem is, “friends” don’t want to “hurt” a friend by calling an ambulance when they pass out or act horrifyingly erratic ; or they don’t want to be known as “a snitch” for calling the authorities to an underage drinking party if one of their friends is out cold.At a high school graduation party, after consuming so much José Cuervo Gold (most of a quart) I passed out. My friends rolled me up in plastic and left me in the back yard in the rain. That’s a significant memory because, after learning about alcohol poisoning, it’s clear I could have died that night. And that illustrates yet another problem with underage drinking: most teens are ignorant of the dangers.
So, someone will ask, “Then why lower the drinking age if teens are ignorant of the dangers from alcohol abuse?” Because bartenders and liquor store attendants generally know when someone is too inebriated to purchase more, although drunks will still get their drink on. The other thing is, a barroom is a different atmosphere from a private, clandestine party. People will drink too much in bars, but few will drink so much they can die from alcohol poisoning.
Few bar owners or bartenders want to deal with people who are falling down drunk. It may be funny, or even salacious if the girls get up on tables and dance nekkid, but things can get out of hand pretty quick and the quickest way to lose one’s liquor license is to have the police called. Whenever a liquor license comes up for renewal, those who control the permits look at the bar’s rap sheet.It’s just a dialogue the Amethyst Initiative is asking for at this stage. They are of the belief that when presented with facts and reason, most Americans will make the correct choice. Me, I’m not convinced. Most Americans make choices based on hysteria or ancient superstitions regardless of the facts. Lowering the drinking age will be no different.
It will take a lot of education, starting long before kids get to college, on the dangers of drinking. The college party scene is popularized in movies, TV shows and our culture in general. Remember Natalee Holloway, the American teen lost in Aruba? She was falling down drunk by many accounts when she went missing during her high school class trip.Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the most vocal and virulent anti-alcohol group in America, is firmly against lowering the drinking age and they’ll have plenty of loud-mouthed radio hosts who have no use for facts on their side blaring about the evil, left-wing liberal agenda that’s promoting underage drinking.
Which is too bad. The Amethyst Initiative is trying to save lives. Personally, I think the drinking age — the age of consent — should be 16. For drinking, sex, drug use … oh yeah, and all drugs that are now illegal should be legal. But, the majority of Americans don’t wish to recognize that A) the “war” on drugs isn’t working and B) making the drinking age 21 isn’t working either.
Thomas Paine, one of our Founding Fathers, wrote of the “Age of Reason” (in three parts) and Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence based on that deistic philosophy. It was part of the “Age of Enlightenment.” Wonder how either would react if they saw that, 200-plus years later, we don’t make our national decisions based on reason and enlightenment, but on emotional hysteria.
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The name “Amethyst” comes from the Greeks. It actually means “not intoxicated.” You can find a pretty good explanation of the term and the Greek myth that spawned it by Clicking Here.
And in the interest of honest disclosure, I like seeing women getting a little tipsy and then a lot nekkid — or just a lot nekkid, they don’t have to be tipsy. But I don’t like to see them so drunk they’re taken advantage of or dying. I’m all for partying, with or without alcohol, but not when it becomes injurious to some of the participants.
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