Crazies

by von

Randy Balko has an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post on the (increasingly common) "zero tolerance" approach to parents who supply kids with alcohol.  (Via Michael Totten, blogging at Instapundit.) It reminded me of a couple things and since -- egad! -- this is a blog, I'll share them:

First, despite the fact that I'm not much the drunk driving fan, Mothers Against Drunk Driving remains a seriously creepy organization staffed by seriously creepy busybodies.  Maybe I'm missing a crucial fact or two, but any person (or group) who thinks that eight years in prison is a just punishment for hosting a kegger is totally off the Christmas card list.  Really, people, get a grip.  You're embarrassing yourselves.

Second, America remains utterly wacked-out about alcohol.  If ever a nation needed a stiff drink, this one does.  It will not be the end of the world if your teenage kid has a beer in your presence; nor will Western Civilization (further) decline as a result of a couple of Zimas at a slumber party.

Since I realize that our peculiar brand of neo-Puritanism is totally the fault of my Protestant forefathers, I'd like to offer the following on behalf of my people:

Sorry.   

And while I'm also issuing apologies for my people:  sorry about the whole genocide thing, Native-American-Indian folks; oh, and the slavery/Jim Crow/racism thing too, Black people; and a personal "my bad" from my part-Northern Irish ass for the "troubles"; and apologies for the whole "oppress the womenfolk" meme we had goin' there for a while; and we totally screwed up with the anti-Semitism vibe; etc.; etc. ...

Comments

[Ugh]

AAAAHHHH! BOLD!!

[Ugh]

Turn off the bold von, I beg you!

[von]

What? I don't see it on IE.

[von]

Better?

[3legcat]

von - generally i agree, but which do you chose? being complicit in your kid's friend's lies to their parents, or choosing to have the (many) uncomfortable (socially dubious) phone conversations with the parents who prefer to be lied to? or is there another option?

[Hal]

Well, my cousin was killed by a drunk driver. My Aunt is militant regarding drunk driving and all the attending baggage. I think one's perspective changes tremendously when one's child has been taken away by something.

Just something to keep in mind when you're whining about MADD.

Considering the number of alcohol related deaths per year is somewhere around 17,000 or so, I think that someone who has such a visceral reaction to 3,000 people dying on 9/11 might have a wee bit of compassion for something that takes the lives of 5 - 6 times that amount each and every year here in the US.

[Gromit]

I'm a teetotaler, myself, and I don't think much of alcohol as a recreational drug, for personal reasons. But on a certain level, I've often wondered if minimum drinking ages don't in fact contribute to later binge drinking.

That said, when I was young, the kids whose parents said "I'd rather you drink here where I know you're safe" always seemed to be lushes. But yeah, 8 years sounds a bit steep.

It is interesting that you mention the oppression of women, though, Von, since the women's suffrage movement and the temperance movement went largely hand-in-hand, if I recall correctly.

[KCinDC]

s/Randy/Radley/

[SomeCallMeTim]

Chycks ruin everything....

[Barry Freed]

Hal-- read the article in the WP that von linked to. This is about prosecuting parents for hosting parties with alcohol for their kids and friends and confiscating all of their car keys so no one can leave until they're sober in the morning. Such parties are given by concerned and responsible parents for such events as Prom night when they know that kids will be out drinking and driving without such a venue being provided (I've got to wonder how the "getting laid" bit is dealt with though). In other words, MADD's policy of supporting this zero-tolerance policy is supporting MORE drunk drivers on the roads not less.

[Phil]

But on a certain level, I've often wondered if minimum drinking ages don't in fact contribute to later binge drinking.

You think? Someone on Reason's blog made a good analogy today: Telling people for 20 years and 364 days that alcohol is bad and forbidden and makes you do all kinds of nasty things and you can't have it, then telling them on the 365th day, "No limits!" is akin to telling them for 20 years that they can't handle money, then giving them a credit card with a $1 million limit and 50% APR on their 21st birthday.

But, hey, since Minnesota gave in to the stick last week, all 50 states now carry a BAC limit of .08 for adults on the road. Woohoo! We're all infinitesimally marginally safer!

[GT]

Is it illegal to serve wine to your teenage son or daughter in your own house?

[Tad Brennan]

Yeah, I agree w/ von that the US is wacked out about EtOH.

It's the schizophrenia that's the biggest tip-off--kind of like our attitude towards food, where all the check-out magazines have photos of chocolate cake on the cover, and headlines about how to lose weight. Whether pushing unhealthy foods, or pushing the latest weight-loss drug, the corporations get their cut, and a saner, healthier America is not in their interests.

I have similar concerns about the extreme attitudes towards alcohol, which may well foster each other.

Still, I tend to agree with Hal that the damage done by alcohol is a huge problem, and I think the death statistics he points to are indicative both of the magnitude of the problem (five times the number of deaths from 9/11, every year), and of the unhealthy lack of effective methods of addressing it.

A healthy cultural environment would have a lot less under-age drinking, a lot less binge-drinking, and a lot fewer people killed by drunken drivers. It's also worth remembering--as spending time on college campuses forces you to confront--that alcohol is implicated in a lot of sexual violence.

I don't know whether we will get to a healthier national culture of drinking by more prosecutions and more MADD agitating, but I sure don't think we are going to get there by chilling out and having a national "stiff drink". These are real problems that need to be solved; if you don't like MADD's methods, propose some others.

Finally, it is worth noting that the author is a fairly standard-issue Cato Institute libertarian who writes against anti-smoking legislation, against trial lawyers, and against what he calls the "nanny state".

Well, I'm a fairly standard-issue liberal who thinks the state can play a constructive role in improving public health, keeping citizens safe, and preventing corporations from making obscene profits by peddling drugs, legal and otherwise.

Just so you know where we both stand.

[Anarch]

Is it illegal to serve wine to your teenage son or daughter in your own house?

It's determined state-by-state; in general, though, the answer is no. Here in Wisconsin, the restriction is much weaker, so much so in fact that I was legally able to serve a 10-year old a beer in a bar.

[It was a Bud Light, IIRC, and to his immense credit -- and his parents' immense shame, having ordered it for him -- he despised it immediately and refused to drink more than a sip. Good on ya, little dude! Save your liver for real beers and leave that rice-mash pisswater to the wankers.]

[Not that I'm a snob or anything.]

Back to the topic: having worked in a college bar for a number of years, yes, I'm in a position to say that our drinking habits are completely screwy. My folks introduced me to alcohol at a young age, and while I've certainly had binges that I later regretted (well, kinda) I always did so under controlled conditions, i.e. having first arranged rides, places to crash, and so forth. It's just common sense. Likewise, while I occasionally get plastered I don't that often because... why? There's no particular thrill associated with it; I'm not transgressing anything; I'm not "indulging in forbidden fruits" because they were never forbidden; so I'll do it if and when I want to, which is much the same way I do anything I intermittently enjoy.

The 18-year-olds I was serving? Not so much.

All of this, incidentally, should not be taken as binding on alcoholics or people with a predisposition towards alcoholism, but for the rest of us I think it's reasonable enough. Let your kids drink when they're young, desensitize them to the "scandalous", "forbidden" nature of alcohol, and (barring the above) they should turn out fine.

Probably.

[Phil]

. . . preventing corporations from making obscene profits by peddling drugs, legal and otherwise . . .

Just for the record, the industry average operating margin for companies in the alcoholic beverage business is around 12%. I don't know if you consider that "obscene" or not.

I don't know whether we will get to a healthier national culture of drinking by more prosecutions and more MADD agitating, but I sure don't think we are going to get there by chilling out and having a national "stiff drink". These are real problems that need to be solved; if you don't like MADD's methods, propose some others.

Well, prosecuting people for keeping drunk drivers off the road certainly isn't going to help at all, I'd wager. In any case, you can't just argue by assertion that "these are real problems that need to be solved." In a world in which alcohol exists and is used -- legally or not, and believe me, millions of years of evolution and history show that people will seek out mind-altering substances regardless of legality -- there is going to be a certain amount of this stuff. Without defining a point of acceptability, we can't just assert that we're beyond it.

There are risks and danger with every behavior, and there are levels of that risk that we deem acceptable. I'm not convinced that alcohol is so sui generis that we must define its acceptable risk level artificially low to appease people who appear to have lost all sensibility about the subject.

Not so incidentally, cultures that are thought to have much healthier attitudes towards alcohol -- say, France -- have rates of alcohol-related traffic deaths not that much different from ours, not more than a percent or two. The first figure I can find shows them with 8,079 road deaths in 2000, with 31% attributed to alcohol. With a population of 60 million, that's 4.1/1000, compared to our 6.5/1000.

[Slartibartfast]

Well, prosecuting people for keeping drunk drivers off the road certainly isn't going to help at all, I'd wager.

Sort of the alcoholic version of sex ed lite: we'll only teach you that you shouldn't and in fact cannot drink. And then we'll pretend that you're not, in fact, drinking, until such time as you kill someone.

[Slartibartfast]

Come to think of it, maybe if we pretend the pretend drinking isn't happening, the occurrence of pretend sex will drop. It's something to consider.

[Anarch]

Come to think of it, maybe if we pretend the pretend drinking isn't happening, the occurrence of pretend sex will drop.

I, for one, would like reduce my occurrence of pretend sex.

[J. Michael Neal]

When I first came up here to Minnesota to go to school, there was a bar two blocks from my dorm that served only 3.2 beer. It was still illegal to serve minors, but there was an unspoken but well known agreement with the cops that they would never come in and check anything.

The place disappeared years ago, which is a real shame. By the time you get hammered on 3.2, you're too busy running to the urinal to drive anywhere. I thought that this was a perfect set of training wheels for freshmen.

[Bruce Baugh]

Personally, I'd focus more on the real problem: people who are not driving safely. Some of them are drunk. Some of them are exhausted. Some of them are under stress. Conversely, for a fairly wide range of blood alcohol levels, some people are safe drivers and others aren't. The law and policy are so wrapped in chemical data that they've lost track of the scale which ought to matter, actual human behavior. My impression is that the march to lower blood alcohol thresholds hasn't actually removed very many risky drivers from the roads at all, and that policies aimed at ferreting out the hidden possible risks end up taking resources away from deal with the real obvious problem cases.

By the way, one of my brothers is brain damaged after a drunken one-car accident. He got up to about .26 and rolled his car. He was stupid to get in that situation. I'm glad he didn't die, and glad for the good things his life has had since then. I know exactlyw hat it's like to sit wondering if you're going to lose a relative because of calamity stemming from alcohol abuse. It's just that I don't think that pain is license to go shooting at things that aren't helpful or useful targets.

[Catsy]

Eh. Alcohol is one of half a dozen things about which American culture is truly and deeply schizo, although you can file that broadly under the category of drugs. We all have our favorite reality-altering substances--booze, weed, Fox News--the bottom line in behaving responsible is the ability to weigh risks, practice moderation, and know when and where.

Our collective national derangement about human sexuality is far more damaging, I'll wager.

[dutchmarbel]

What culture you're in seems to be important...
From BBC News a piece about binge drinking & opening times of pubs, in which a judge states:

"Continental-style drinking requires continental-style people - people who sit quietly chatting away at cafe tables."

He said British drinking involved "standing up, shouting at each other in crowded bars, trying to consume gallons of beer at a time".

I grew up in Amsterdam and if you'd see really really totally drunk young men in 99% of the cases they'd be either British or Swedish. Not Americans.

I think the emphasis should be more on taking responsibility of you condition. No matter wether you have taken sleeping pills, drunk, smoked something or are really tired: you should not drive a car when you are not in proper condition for driving it. Trying to take the responsibility away from the individual by regulations puts the emphasis more on the regulations than on WHY people want to regulate it.

[Catsy]

I grew up in Amsterdam and if you'd see really really totally drunk young men in 99% of the cases they'd be either British or Swedish. Not Americans.

That's because all of the Americans in Amsterdam are there for the pot. ;)

[Slartibartfast]

And here I thought it was the hash. If I ever decide to hang up my clearance and go indulge in some sort of other intoxicant, Amsterdam seems like the place to do it.

[Gromit]

Phil: Not so incidentally, cultures that are thought to have much healthier attitudes towards alcohol -- say, France -- have rates of alcohol-related traffic deaths not that much different from ours, not more than a percent or two. The first figure I can find shows them with 8,079 road deaths in 2000, with 31% attributed to alcohol. With a population of 60 million, that's 4.1/1000, compared to our 6.5/1000.

I'd wager that there are a lot of additional factors involved here: fewer people on the roads and cars of much less lethal mass, for starters. I'm sure alcohol-related gun violence is a lot lower there, too, but that would probably speak more to attitudes toward guns than toward alcohol.

[dutchmarbel]

Catsy; but that is what the Brits used to say too :)

Slartibartfast: travelling to Amsterdam for the intoxants is like travelling to the States for driving lessons when you are a sixteen year old Dutch person - you could get it illegally at home, it is a short lived experience and there is so much more to see and experience in the country you visit ;)

[Nathan Williams]

Would it be worth the trouble for like-minded parents to set up one of these parties but with enough of the relevant parents present to take advantage of the aforementioned loophole about serving alcohol to your own children (Want another beer? Get Dad to go to the keg for you)? I suspect that the police could still find a way to bust such a party, and I wonder what effect that would have on the political situation.

(I find it interesting that the laws that authorize serving alcohol to your underage children often seems to also authorize serving your underage spouse.)

[double-plus-ungood]

If I ever decide to hang up my clearance and go indulge in some sort of other intoxicant, Amsterdam seems like the place to do it.

And what's wrong with Vancouver?

[Slartibartfast]

And what's wrong with Vancouver?

Washington, or BC?

[double-plus-ungood]

Washington, or BC?

Dope is tolerated in Vancouver, Washington?

Vancouver, BC, Slarti. While at a BBQ on the weekend, a relative in his seventies pulled me aside, and took me to the garden shed to ask what was wrong with his 7' spindly high pot plant. "That's the male," I explained. "Dammit, I killed off the females," he said.

I expect that there'll be evening courses in pot cultivation soon. This relative bought his seeds over the counter at a marijuana cafe on Vancouver's "Pot Block."

We're not called "North America's Amsterdam" for nothing.

[st]

dpu - yeah, yeah, Vancouver is great and all, but why'd you have to put it all the way over there on the wrong side of the continent? Pretty selfish, if you ask me.

[alex]

Well, this is another case where the American public is cheerfully punishing teenagers for indulging in behavior that adults are ashamed of. Why correct your own sins when you can beat somebody else for them?

[Gary Farber]

Another example of brilliance in mixing the law and minors.

[Anderson]

Europeans get to drink in cities with real mass transit systems. Just a thought.

(A long-defunct comic "That's Jake" featured a kid asking her stumped elders, "If you're not supposed to drink and drive, then why do bars have parking lots?")

[dutchmarbel]

Europeans get to drink in cities with real mass transit systems. Just a thought.

Nah, those stop long befor the pub stops. The Dutch are saved by bicycles though officially you are not allowed to ride on those either when you are incapacitated.

It is actually a problem here too. Lots of policechecks helped a bit, and campaigns that a 'driver' should be appointed and stay sober ("bob"). Two decades ago the company drink was mostly beer, these days there is a lot of water and softdrinks, so general attitude changes - but it changes slowly.

[Catsy]

Nevertheless, it would be interesting to contrast the rate of drunk driving fatalities and/or accidents in Seattle--which has an almost unequaled mass transit system--with that of another American city of comparable demographics which lacks one.

[bernard Yomtov]

Not so incidentally, cultures that are thought to have much healthier attitudes towards alcohol -- say, France -- have rates of alcohol-related traffic deaths not that much different from ours, not more than a percent or two. The first figure I can find shows them with 8,079 road deaths in 2000, with 31% attributed to alcohol. With a population of 60 million, that's 4.1/1000, compared to our 6.5/1000.

France actually has quite strict laws about drunk driving, stricter than ours I think. Whether they were in place in 2000 I don't know.

[Jackmormon]

The problem with France's drunk driving laws is that they're almost totally unenforced. There are almost no traffic cops, and nobody gets busted for wild driving, drunk or sober.

[dutchmarbel]

I looked up the Dutch figures and the percentage of people with too much alcohol (>0.5 promille, about two glasses) went down from 4.6% in 2000 to 4.2% in 2001. Of the latter 4,8% was male and 2,4% female. The age group most likely to have drunk too much is 35 - 50 for both genders. Driving with too much alcohol for youngsters between 18 (legal driving age) and 25 was down more than average. Still the amount of actual alcohol death in traffic is three times as high in this age group - less experience in driving and general youthfull recklessness combine really bad with alcohol.

We have campaings especially for young people, mostly aimed at awareness. Studies have been performed for years and awareness helps slighly (the more it influences peer pressure the better) but the best effect comes from strict rules and big change to get caught via aselect traffic controles (they check everybody, not just people that act suspect).

[liberal japonicus]

There are some deeper links between drunk driving and public transport. Here in Japan, the laws are very strict and recent court decisions that make them stricter and widen the responsibility for the drunken driver. (Even before this ruling, if I or any other teacher were to be cited for drunken driving, we would probably be fired)

Obviously, suspending a license in the US would probably mean that the person could no longer get to work, but with mass transport, license suspension is a viable option.

Here is a link to a page about japanese traffic law, with some stats about drunk driving.

[bernard Yomtov]

The problem with France's drunk driving laws is that they're almost totally unenforced. There are almost no traffic cops, and nobody gets busted for wild driving, drunk or sober.

I'm curious what you base this on, since my limited information suggests the opposite.

[dutchmarbel]

LOL, I recognize the bike problem.

If a car has an accident with a biker or a pedestrian the cardriver is minimal 50% guilty even if they just jumped under their car. Protection of the vulnerable and such.

From the figures the drunk driving deaths seem comparable. We have approximately 90 registered drunk driving deaths per 16000000, which would translate in a little over 700 deaths for a Japan sized population (and almost 1700 drunk driving deaths in the US). But we assume that that it quite often does not get registered so we assume we have 200-250 real drunk driving deaths.

Does Japan have a specific youth problem too? And are they forcing/encouraging youngsters to abstain from alcohol?

[Jackmormon]

I lived in France for a number of years (about three solid, and on and off for about four) and have no recollection of seeing cruisers moving with traffic on the Periph, seeing drivers pulled over for crazy driving, or hearing any of my young, male acquaintances express any nervousness about traffic tickets. Nobody I know there has any compunction about driving home through Paris when tipsy.

A close French friend who visited the US was at first appalled by the number of traffic cops here, but then he admitted that people drive more rationally in the States and that maybe a few more patrollers would contain the problem in France. (But then he also drove a motorcycle and had extra reason to fear erratic drivers.)

I *did* get pulled over once, but it wasn't for a moving violation, exactly. We were about six in a tiny Renault, coming back from a party, and the driver was actually smoking a jay when the cops saw him. We all tumbled out of the car, completely stoned, and a little scared. The cops (there were about seven of them) confiscated our hash, we chatted a little about French literature, and then we went on our merry way. I'm not making this up.

At the end of the day, though, I don't have statistics or anything to back up my assertions; the anecdotal is what I'm basing them on.

[dutchmarbel]

Wow... I just read the US figures and there appareantly are almost 17000 alcohol deaths per year, which is a lot more than our figures extrapolated.

That is weird, I thought there would be LESS in the States because I always feel that alcohol is ... eh.... less socially acceptable, less part of normal life in the US.

If you drink too much, how big is the chance that you get caught? Of all our measures I think that one had the biggest impact and now that we are spending less money on aselect testing by the police the figures creeps up again.

Oh, and if you can savely assume that there WILL be drinking making sure that it is in a safe environment and that the people can stay overnight seems a fine idea to me.