My thoughts exactly. Having traveled a bit, I've noticed that the stiffer the alcohol regulations, the more irresponsible people tend to be with their drinking when they come of age. The result of a whole lot of new found liberties all at once, with no real grasp of what the small prints attached really entail. I remember in my early 20s, when some of my American friends' idea of having fun was let's go out get wasted and I was puzzled by this notion.
In my opinion, being responsible with alcohol requires experience, which we all know is acquired through trials and error. I share the controversial belief that parents should be the ones to responsibly shepherd their kids' drinking habits. They shouldn't just wait for them to turn 21 and discover it in the "wild", or worse, let them go in those popular drinking safaris in Canada or Mexico, where the legal age is lower and regulations somewhat more loosely applied.
It's a good theory, but on the other hand stiffer alcohol regulations could be a response to a larger underlying prevalence in alcohol abuse.
You often find more police stations in places with more crime. Does that mean police stations cause crime? I doubt it. You could argue police stations cannot reduce crime to the levels of lesser crime areas but you cannot say that police stations are the cause of crime. The reality is: there is crime so you build police stations, not the other way around.
I believe this is the same for alcohol regulations. There are a lot of alcohol abuse so they make alcohol regulations stiffer. It may be true that regulations does nothing to reduce abuse and actually cause people to abuse alcohol even more but there is no evidence to prove this unambiguously.
>could be a response to a larger underlying prevalence in alcohol abuse
You have an interesting theory, I'll hands down give you that, its a compelling perspective and I've never heard our nation's alcohol relationship in those terms, but that having been said, I feel like our nation is one that historically has overestimated our problems with alcohol. It may be a response to prevalence, I'm not going to take that away, but there is also the factor that we perceive the same prevalence differently.
I grew up near the Vermont/Canada border, the first time I went up there to drink I was 14 and we were raging it hard in some Quebecois' basement. I went upstairs to take a leak and almost shit a brick because unbeknownst to me, their parents were chilling upstairs watching TV and were fine with the fact we were getting wasted and hooking up in the basement. One of the girls that had gone up to cananda with me was puking her guts out in the basement bathroom and refusing to speak anything but broken French and they were completely fine with this. All the Quebecois' parents knew they were off getting trashed and were fine with it too, hell the mother of the family me and pukey mcgee were staying with us bought us our booze. A few years later I had a handful of friends at my place in the states and we had a few shots in the attic over newyears. My parents found and were pissed, my, and everyone that was there's, parents yelled at us quite a bit.
So we might have more abuse here, but we certainly define abuse differently.
Chiming in with more anecdotal evidence. My folks allowed us to (illegally) drink alcohol starting at age 14. It was something we did during special occasions, and we'd of course drink smaller portions due to body size differences. Reaching "drinking" age was no big deal.
Only once in my life have I ever drunk so much I threw up. And that was on my 25th birthday when I got a bit careless.
In my opinion, being responsible with alcohol requires experience, which we all know is acquired through trials and error. I share the controversial belief that parents should be the ones to responsibly shepherd their kids' drinking habits. They shouldn't just wait for them to turn 21 and discover it in the "wild", or worse, let them go in those popular drinking safaris in Canada or Mexico, where the legal age is lower and regulations somewhat more loosely applied.