When I was in high school and college, I was sure I was one of the only kids who would ever have to deal with a 21 year-old drinking age. The drinking age had been 18 in Connecticut when I got there, and it only moved up under Reagan Administration pressure. I had a middle school teacher who told us about being a legal drinker for a couple of years and sitting in a bar on New Year’s Eve when he went back to being an illegal drinker.
The logic of 21 always seemed a little flawed: if the issue is drunk driving, why not enforce drunk driving laws? Build all cars with breathalyzers in the ignition procedure. For that matter, if it is a larger matter of road safety, why not move the driving age to 18 and begin mandatory field tests for renewal after 65 (because parents are fed up with driving their kids all over the place and old people don’t like losing their wheels). Anyway, the Reagan Administration wanted 21 for drinking and a continuation of the 55mph national speed limit, and it was a Republican administration, so it actually got what it wanted. Surely someone, someday, would realize how dumb the rules were.
Sure enough, politicians eventually got wise to the silliness of 55mph. I suspect most of them have/had the common sense to realize that the vestige of Prohibition is pretty ridiculous, too, but they also know that very few 18-21 year olds vote, so it isn’t worth ticking off MADD.
What is even crazier and more destructive, however, is our quixotic struggle against illegal drugs. The best that can be said for the effort is that on the principles – thou shalt not be sedated – we have given up. We have Big Pharma analogues for most illegal drugs:
http://www.slate.com/id/2175730/entry/2175732/ (Section 2)
Unfortunately, we have not taken the obvious approach and legalized the original drugs. In general, I am in favor of simply ignoring laws that do not continue to make sense (the Second Amendment, for example) instead of going through the societal brain damage of trying to repeal them. But continuing Prohibition long after giving up belief in the reasons for it just means that there continues to be a preposterous amount of money in illegal drugs, and violence defending the illegal money:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/08/afghan.taliban/index.html
http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2008/1222/073.html
We shouldn’t have to rely on Republicans for this, especially the endangered species of libertarian Republicans:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122843683581681375.html
