Tart Cider: Stark, raving madd

August 30, 2005

Stark, raving madd

Browsing through the Post's letters page yesterday afternoon, I noted with some amusement that the CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving is a man by the name of Andrew Murie. This is emblematic, I think, of an organization that started with a reasonable moniker and the unimpeachable mandate that went with it, and then set about gradually turning itself into PETA.

Murie's letter, in response to Adam Radwanski's entirely reasonable August 26 column, is a perfect example:

Ontario's legal age of 19 for alcohol consumption is anything but "counterproductive," as Mr. Radwanski opines. Lowering the drinking age to 18 in Ontario is something that has been tried before and had terrible implications. The predictable result of lowering the drinking age is an increase in alcohol-related car crashes amongst teenagers. A recent study by the Canadian Institute for Health Information showed that those provinces with an age of majority of 18 had higher alcohol deaths and injuries amongst teenagers.

The bold part is true, though you'll note it has nothing to do with automobiles. From the study:

For provinces with a legal drinking age of 19, the rate for alcohol-related major injury among youth aged 18 was 9 per 100,000 and remained virtually steady over the three-year period. In contrast, provinces with a drinking age of 18 showed a rate of major injury in this group that increased steadily from 11 per 100,000 population during the first year of the study to a rate of over 15 per 100,000 in 2002–2003.

20 million of 31 million Canadians are legally prohibited from consuming a certain ostensibly dangerous substance until they're 19, and (assuming causality for the sake of argument) that only lowers the rate of injury due to that substance by two-to-six per 100,000? This is an argument against lowering the drinking age… how? Say you give Group A two shots of Absinthe every night, and Group B none — you'd expect Group A to have infinitely more Absinthe-related major injuries than Group B, right? If people in Group B started showing up in droves at the ER with Absinthe-related major injuries, I imagine you'd just abandon the experiment.

If alcohol is to remain legal at all — and MADD hasn't yet publicly admitted to advocating otherwise — we're going to have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that people of drinking age are going to suffer many more alcohol-related injuries than people of drinking age-minus-one. If that doesn't happen, it's probably an argument for lowering the drinking age — either because our 18-year-olds are mature enough to handle it or because our enforcement mechanism doesn't work very well at all.

Murie continues:

Further, there is clear empirical evidence that if the drinking age were raised to 21, thousands of lives would be saved.

But he isn't going to tell you what it is.

Murie continues:

With respect to Mr. Radwanski's comments on government monopolies and closing times for licensed establishments, there is also considerable empirical evidence that soundly refutes his misconceptions on Ontario Government alcohol policy and regulations.

But he isn't going to tell you where to find it.

Prohibitionists really sour my mash, I tell you what. It's funny, and instructive, to see the very different strategies coming in from the UK, where the battle against yobbism rages on. Martin Samuel has some topical, and pointed, words on the subject in today's Times:

Thanks to the ever-growing family of alcopops, kids can become as ill, aggressive and overconfident as the next man while never troubling their taste buds with anything more complex than a glorified lollipop. Re-education is required. If you are over 18 and your favourite drink is an alcopop, here is the message: you’re a wuss. Not because you don’t really like alcohol, but because you don’t really like alcohol and you haven’t the strength of character to say that to whoever is getting the round in.

Sounds logical. Alternatively, of course, we could raise the drinking age to 30.

Posted by Chris Selley at August 30, 2005 09:58 PM

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Comments

Or you could ban alcohol completely. Remeber how well that worked before? How do you spell Cosa Nostra in Quebecoise? Or the MOB in a Windsor twang? Anyway, with the price of gas headed up past the price of vintage champagnee, its likely that the next group to turn drinking age will not have the privilege of killing themselves on the highway.

Posted by: scanner at August 31, 2005 05:24 PM

You’re interminable and very likely portly. You’re also embarrassingly frivolous, an inveterate contrarian, a dour quasi-critic of cultural ephemera, and, not usually, a consistent bore. You speak from no particular authority and your shoddy Bayesian deconstructions are always silly and without gravity. Why I persist in visiting this site is something of an ineffable morbidity. But in fairness, visiting this site allows me to gauge the pulse of a common, hermitic Canadian, however shallow it may beat.

Posted by: anon at September 4, 2005 11:00 PM