Legal Drinking Age 1800`S
However, in many other Asian countries, alcohol laws do not exist or are very flexible. Cambodia, Macau and Vietnam do not have a minimum age to buy or consume alcohol. As can be seen in the table below, since the repeal of prohibition in 1933, there has been great volatility in the age of alcohol consumption in the states. Shortly after the 21st Amendment was ratified in December, most states set their purchasing age at 21, which was the voting age at the time. Most of these limits remained constant until the early 1970s. From 1969 to 1976, about 30 states lowered their purchasing age, usually to 18. This was largely due to the fact that the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 with the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971. Many states began lowering their minimum drinking age, most in 1972 or 1973. [2] [3] [4] Twelve states have maintained their purchasing age at 21 since the repeal of prohibition and have never changed it. A fourth argument that keeps coming up when discussing the drinking age in the United States is its rampant inconsistency with the minimum age for almost everything else. This argument has become almost cliché for good reason: it is very convincing. In America, the age of majority, the age at which a person is considered an adult before the law (and therefore capable of making his or her own decisions), is eighteen (with some exceptions in states and territories). At the age of majority, Americans are given the right to do many riskier things than drinking a beer.
At eighteen, a person can open a credit card, take out a loan or enter into a binding contract (possible financial risks), accept risky medical treatments, and marry without a parent`s consent. Victorians and Edwardians drank for pleasure, but they also drank for pain. The use of alcohol as a treatment in medical practice continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been prescribed for a number of physiological and psychological illnesses and Victorians admitted to hospitals have sometimes been treated with certain types of alcoholic beverages. Within the medical profession, there have been debates about the effectiveness and ethics of prescribing alcohol, and there have been concerns about therapeutic nihilism – that alcohol has done more harm than good not only to patients, but also to professional reputation. Nevertheless, it remained a conventional medical treatment and people believed in alcohol as medicine. Some interviewees for the Edwardians study described their mothers drinking stout during pregnancy or after childbirth because they believed it was nutritious and acted as a tonic. The idea of self-medication with alcohol may have alarmed the medical profession, but it was popular with alcohol consumers, meaning that the health benefits of alcohol had enormous commercial value for the beverage trade. The marketing of alcohol as a tonic was a way to reach consumers and increase sales at a time when the beverage trade faced moral and political hostility. By simply renaming products to include the word “tonic” on labels, alcohol producers have boosted the market and led to increased sales.
The boom in tonic wine sales at the end of the century could not have happened without a receptive consumer market. People trusted alcohol as a therapeutic drug, so companies only had to market products that could treat and prevent various diseases. Drinking alcohol for health was not the same as drinking it for pleasure or intoxication. Consumers could therefore drink alcohol “for health” in a socially acceptable manner and the beverage trade could sell an intoxicant under the guise of a tonic. In summary, there are many compelling reasons to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. From a physiological point of view, twenty-one years means no brain development. This makes eighteen- to twenty-year-olds safer by removing a legal barrier to emergency assistance for adults who fall under the MLDA. It would also better reflect successful policies in Europe. Finally, it would eliminate a number of very hypocritical inconsistencies in the law, which considers people between eighteen and twenty adults in all but one case.
It`s time to reopen the national conversation about alcohol consumption. But men weren`t the only drinkers. Women from all walks of life drank alcohol. Policy research focused on women`s drinking—whether working class women drinking in public or middle- and upper-class women drinking “secretly” in private—didn`t seem to matter because all women`s drinking was seen as problematic.
