One college town's uneasy embrace of drinking
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
In normal countries, teenagers start drinking in a supervised environment (read: Mom and Dad, who won't appreciate that Sonny threw up in his shoe again because he came home way too sozzled to find the toilet bowl), and they start on beer and wine, which makes it much more difficult to overdose. In America the infantilized teenagers go off to college and then proceed to black out on spirits, because spirits are easier to smuggle into the dorm. What could possibly go wrong there?
Also: the American problem of trying to get on top of alcohol abuse by limiting availability, when you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility. Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much.
That said, I'd love for drunk driving to have harsher penalties. Not jail, but simply driving ban for at least a year with an extended retest (psych eval, as they do in other countries if you lose your license to drunk driving).
Simple public intoxication or illegal consumption is, in most cases, something you can have expunged if it's a first offense and you pay the bribe^H^H^H^H^H pre-trial diversion fee.
Like many laws in America a lot of it emotion driven - a lower drinking age would most likely help the college binge drinking problem, but advocating for such a law means someone is going to call you out on trying to turn the children of America into alcoholics.
Likewise, no one wants to be on the other end of the outrage when celebrity/athlete/politician gets 10 years for having a "couple beers" after work (doesn't everyone have a couple beers? thats too harsh! /s).
Research suggests that you might be wrong.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-...
> Key quote: “Harsher sanctions to drinking and driving may generate no marginal deterrent effect if drivers’ perceived risks of receiving the punishments are low. Therefore, rather than escalating sanction severity, increasing the probability of detection and/or enforcement may be more effective in reducing drinking and driving.”
[0] https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint#Legality_in_t...
The theory was that much or our criminal law system makes an assumption of a rational actor. A 1% chance of severe penalty would deter a crime where they payoff is minor (i.e.., the small chance of a severely punished DUI would convince a rational actor to call a cab).
But it doesn't appear to work that way. The article suggested that the best way to deter certain types of repeated criminal behavior are consequences that are swift, certain, and measured (in severity). Instead, what we have is slow, random, and severe. Supposedly, that does little to deter crime, but does a great filling up prisons and creating people who have a lifelong criminal history for job applications.
But actual people don't respond that way. They respond to the risk rather than the expected punishment.
In Canada my very alternative friends to whom casual law breaking like illegal drinking and drugs would be nothing, would almost universally never consider drinking and driving.
In the US those same type of friends seeming drink and drive 5-6 days a week, often after consuming amounts of alcohol I consider ridiculous. Additionally I regularly interact with professionals and even professors who drink and drive.
This is purely my opinion, but the difference I experience here is outa control when it comes to drinking and driving and I do think the harsh punishments have something to do with it.
An attractive sentiment in general, but it's not true. Texas is just like every other state, in that they spend way too much on the "enforcement" of drunk-driving laws. The reason is obvious: local police and sheriffs get the same ridiculous federal grants that LEOs in all other states get.
EDIT: Congratulations to Louisiana, I expect they laugh at Texas' patchwork of dry and "partially-moist" counties.
In contrast, many states in the north are now zero tolerance states. The limit is quite low, and the penalties are quite harsh. Well, that pales in comparison to Japan, where you would probably lose your job if caught (and they have a very low limit also).
Children in the States, because they are already breaking the law by drinking, routinely get behind the wheel without thinking about it. They get home safely and learn that it's ok to drink and drive.
In the US, we have a combination of a binge drinking culture, a driving culture and a fierce independence from authority. The combination isn't the best for deterring drinking and driving.
Here's a simple reason laws don't work as well as you'd think: when you drink and drive, you're not in your right mind. You're less inhibited than you would be otherwise and often you think you're fine to drive. Without sober or semi-sober friends around, there's nothing stopping you from doing just that.
Details [Google Translate]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
I can construct equally sensible narratives that have nothing to do with the drinking culture. I can also imagine it's not the drinking culture, but the fact that most American kids go away to college. In some other cultures which have more sensible attitudes towards alcohol (and I do think they are more sensible), I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college.
Which may also be influenced by the probability of 800 miles away being another country (with an entirely different language).
True, but most American cultural pathologies are rooted in mistrust of others, a mistrust which is itself often rooted in one or more fears that derive from ignorance. When you are ignorant and fearful of a problem or a group of people, it's much easier to appeal to your government to do something about it rather than actually try to understand that problem or people. Trusting those people to be responsible is the last thing that occurs to you in such a state of mind.
All I'm trying to say is that this is a specific instance of a much larger trend which has been in place for a long time. I don't know how to fix it.
https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the...
We have a pretty severe problem with alcohol here.
One in five ambulances in London a the weekends are for alcohol related injuries; hospitals in major cities have drunk tanks; cirrhosis is affecting more people and younger people -- and these problems are not in the population of people with alcoholism but in the people who just drink too much.
So it'd be interesting to work out how other countries manage it.
Whereas 20-30 years ago, small village pubs were a mainstay of drinking culture. Turning a blind eye to the occasional kid drinking a pint or two was a heck of a lot safer than pushing them into the cities with fake IDs. Or buying litres of spirits and downing them on a park bench. But pubs can't afford to take any risk nowadays, for each 17 year old you accidentally let into the pub, it's a £10k fine for the manager, £5k fine for the barman who serves the kid. Plus a possible revocation of license.
Then there's the social downsides of being too strict on drinking for the rest of us. The "Think 25?" campaign is particularly terrible, it catches even people like me at age 30. I can understand that maybe I look under 25, but do I really look 17 years or less - that's what the law says they have to legally look out for after all. That is my legal right. It's insulting and an infringement on basic liberties that we should be able to take for granted. I envisage having to carry ID on me for a good 5-10 years more, unless I grow a beard...
I don't think stricter DUI laws will work, they rely on the absurd idea that a drunk will somehow have enough self-awareness to make a rational decision (not to drive).
When I was in college, I was a part of my fraternity's "risk management" team, a group of brothers whose only job is to stay sober during parties, find people who had drunk too much or more commonly people who had completely blacked out and hush them off away from the alcohol or to a safe part of the house where they could be watched for signs of alcohol poisoning and kept safe from being taken advantage of.
If there's any one trend I've noticed while I worked risk management at those parties, it was that the more taboo it is to drink alcohol, the more that people binge drink it. It's always the students whose parents were the most uptight about drinking or those who couldn't purchase alcohol yet who were the biggest binge drinkers and most common to pass out. There was one period during which there was a university crackdown on drinking at fraternity parties, and the most noticeable thing during the crackdown was that people would drink a -lot- more.
The amazing part about it was when people turned 21, it was like they became seasoned drinkers over night. People who had problems pacing themselves during every party would instantly turn into a moderate drinker once their 21st had passed.
I think it would be very interesting to see some studies done on the taboo of drinking and whether it changes people's likelihood to overdrink, because it seemed with every crackdown measure the local police force took against drinking at parties, the problem only got worse.
Seriously though, we need a culture change. You can't tell them they can never drink, then turn them loose in another city by themselves and expect it to not be taken to extremes. That's pretty dumb.
http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
Haha, I guess all the Catholic churches in the other 24 states will get raided next time they have a First Communion. This is just one example of how unreliable these sorts of comparisons are.
Parents gave me beer when i was a kid around 10, shit tasted awful and bitter.
Didn't start drinking again until i discovered british ciders and belgian beers at the age of ~28, but that's still a "once a quarter" thing.
It seems the LEOs cannot win when dealing with a mother who 'knows best'
There are a huge number of situations where there are two sets of rules or prices or options, one for most people and one for people who complain once. If you're a sucker, you pay retail. If you make the slightest effort to haggle, you can save money. You can bargain your traffic tickets down to non-moving violations for fewer points off your license and a smaller fine. If you complain at a hotel you might get a free spa pass. If you have overdue library books, you can sometimes sweet talk the librarian into waiving your fine. If you ask for a raise, you might get it.
There are a huge number of situations where -- by making the slightest protest -- you can sometimes save a bit of time or money or get something for nothing, and moreover there is usually no penalty for trying. I don't think this mother was doing anything different: she may not think her child is a special flower, but she has learned through much experience in life that it never hurts to ask for special treatment, because you sometimes get it.
It was very much a wink-and-grin environment: the "bad photocopy job pasted onto a McDonald's gift card" description is very apt. Some bars were tougher than others, but for a guy, showing up with a favorable distribution of girls would cause the bouncer to look the other way.
It's obvious and egregious (UGA suspends open container laws on gamedays), but as the article's subjects and other HN posters point out, the problem is not bars and fake IDs, and more college students' drinking problems. (Which exist at fraternities, house parties, and other venues as well.) To that end, I laud the focus on safety, education, and one-strikes over just pushing the "scene" underground.
Although the town has stayed the same since my years in Athens, I do think there is an uptick in underage drinking in general, or at the least a larger movement to drinking harder spirits. Personally, I think there is a larger mention of liquor by name in today's music than there has been in the past and that plays a part.