Lower drinking age to 19?

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But with a catch, writes William Cohen, a CNN staffer.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/20/opinion/cohan-underage-drinking-duke/index.html?hpt=ju_t4

The catch would be to get rid of the the 0.08% threshold for drinking and driving, which, I suppose, the law is letting a person do(drink and drive to some extent) abandoning it in favor of zero tolerance instead. If a person has even a drop of alcohol in their system?

Of course, along with a lowering of the drinking age to 19, a zero tolerance policy must be put in place for anything approaching driving while intoxicated. In Brazil, for instance, it is illegal to drive with even a trace amount of alcohol in the bloodstream; in the United States, the 0.08% threshold should be abandoned in favor of zero tolerance. Anyone caught driving with any amount of alcohol in their bloodstream should have his or her driving privileges suspended for at least three years.

I wasn't aware of this regarding Brazil, but it's not the worst idea in the world. Everyone's tolerance is different, and to be honest, I've never wondered or even considered how it was arrived upon to make .08% the legal limit while drinking and driving.

Cohen spoke specifically about Duke University, and how 74% of alcohol-related driving violations regarding students were committed by freshman. In lowering the drinking age, Cohen believes:

When most students are sophomores, one year of college will be in the bag, with the awkward but necessary social adjustments mostly accomplished. Instead of students continuously lusting after the forbidden fruit of alcohol and sneaking around furtively with bottles of vodka and rum and then quickly guzzling them in an effort to get limbered up to be able to "hook up" with one's peers, perhaps a more, shall we say, refined and responsible approach to alcohol can prevail on campus.

While it may stop illegal activities engaged in such as obtaining Fake ID's in order to obtain alcohol, I think drinking responsibly comes as a product of age and maturity. While the law may scare some people away driving while drinking, it's not going to curtail problems such as was seen in California this past week, where a woman was convicted of 2nd degree murder for driving two miles with a dying man on her hood.

Nor, if the statistics are true, will it curtail underage drinking and violations among freshman, either. They'll be, in many cases, the only ones left out of the party, as their sophomore, junior, and senior brethren will be able to partake without fear. And being that-like the Duke University study showed-three quarters of the people who engaged in underage drinking did so as a freshman, I don't see the deterrent.

Unless the idea there is that students(and non-students alike) will only have to wait one year until after high-school graduation, and will show the patience to do so. I wouldn't mind seeing this imposed in "test zones", so to speak, and to see how things would turn out. Perhaps 18 year-old freshmen will prove what the author of this article believes: That seeing the ability to drink as a "goal" much sooner accomplished will lead to a stricter adherence to the law.

And with it, in give-and-take mode, hopefully helping to curtail drunk driving as well, forbidding driving while drinking at all.

Would you be in favor of the drinking age being lowered to 19, with a zero-tolerance policy for drinking and driving?