The return of bathtub gin in Iowa City?
The prohibitionists are slow learners.In Iowa City, Iowa, residents will go to the polls November 6th to vote on an ordinance that would block entry into the city's bars for those adults under 21 years of age. Drinking on college campuses, such as that of the University of Iowa, has gotten desperately out of control over the last two or three generations to the point that binge-drinking is a national health epidemic.
Dr. Rick Dobyns, a geriatrician at University Hospitals, is leading the charge to deny bar entry for these legal adults age 18 to 21, "We have people all over the Midwest send us their children to grow. We should provide them an environment to do so."
So let's talk about that environment. The one that exists today on college campuses all across America, including the U of I, is one in which drinking is glamorous, outlaw behavior. The difference between their environs and that of the nation at large during the disastrous alcohol prohibition of the 1920s is, in effect, nothing at all. An anachronistic, archaic law is flaunted and ignored because it cannot be policed and because it defies human nature. Young adults living on their own for the first time are doing exactly what we expect them of them-- attempting to develop their individual identities and searching for a niche for themselves in the adult world. They're questioning the merit and inherent logic of everything they've been taught, which we should encourage in a nation overrun with corporate drones and global ambivalence, and not surprisingly, they find something lacking in our discriminatory drinking laws.
If legal adults under 21 are kept out of the social establishments in Iowa City, the results there will simply mirror those across the state in Ames, home of Iowa's land-grant university and long-time age-discriminatory socialization restrictions: Parties will rage ever larger off-campus where law enforcement is more restricted in access, and bars competing for a smaller pool of customers will be more likely to offer cheaper drinks that encourage excessive drinking.
The solution is to decriminalize--nationally-- legal adults enjoying legal drink. The subject was broached during the Democratic party's presidential debate on MSNBC in September, but only candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel had the stones to say they supported the drinking rights of Americans old enough to die in Iraq. The 21-year-old age requirement for legal drink is not preventing the further social damage of youth binging, it's fueling it. Has it occurred to anyone that the reason these young men and women are not acting like adults is because they're not being treated as such?
posted by CM @ 9:04 PM
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