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Comment by beenBoutIT | Hacker News Reader

Our BS drinking laws artificially elevate alcohol's badass status among the under 21 crowd. Rolling back the drinking age to the modern world standard of 16 would drastically reduce student drinking by equating it with kid behavior. Nobody's interested in doing highschool shit in college.

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New Zealand changed the drinking age from 20 to 18 many years ago.

You could look at papers about that to understand what changed.

Although anecdotally New Zealanders drink wayyyy more than Americans (so maybe hard to compare).

More than rural Americans or urban Americans? I'd assume that rural people everywhere drink more because there is less else to do, at least before the modern era of electronic entertainment

NZers drink 8.8 litres per person aged over 15 years.

The state with the highest consumption in 2016 was New Hampshire, with a total alcohol consumed per capita: 4.76 gallons (18 litres).

Wow.

Comes from the following writeup for NZers:

From the domestic figures released by Statistics New Zealand, in the year 2017 [7]:

476 million litres of alcoholic drinks were available for domestic consumption: 289 million litres of beer 111 million litres of wine 77 million litres of spirits and spirit-based drinks

By volume, we drink almost three-times as much beer than wine. However, by alcohol content or standard drinks, 12.6 million litres of pure alcohol comes from beer, 11.5 million litres from wine, and 10 million litres from spirits. This totals 34.2 million litres of pure alcohol per year, or 8.8 litres per person aged over 15 years. On average, this means that every New Zealander drinks almost 2 standard drinks per day. However, in reality, we know that rather than New Zealanders drinking small amounts daily, around half of all alcohol in New Zealand is consumed in heavy drinking sessions.

I'm a 23 y/o Kiwi and have recently been self reflecting about my drinking habbits and what I want to make from my life. I drink heavily 2 or 3 nights a week and the problem i have with it is it totally aborbs my weekends. I end up spending my Saturday/Sunday days in bed hungover. The thing I find difficult about taking breaks from drinking is I live with 5 of my best friends and one of them wanting to drink usually convinces the rest of the household. Adding to the fact that there is always MDMA and other drugs floating around makes this harder on my body.

> Rolling back the drinking age to the modern world standard of 16 would drastically reduce student drinking by equating it with kid behavior. Nobody's interested in doing highschool shit in college.

Wouldn't this just move student drinking from college to highschool, not reduce overall student drinking? I don't think it's a good idea to having the driving and drinking age be the same. I'm sure lots of parents of teenagers would be very upset if their children could legally drink.

I come from latin america and my family let me drink at family events under supervision at 16. Around 17-18 I went out to parties and never came back home super wasted. Nowadays I barely drink.

Seems to me if you treat your kid with respect and guide them they can be responsible adults.

Also mind you that the legal smoking age in the US is 18 and pretty much everyone agrees that it is much worse than drinking.

I think the differences between Latin America drinking cultures and Untied States is much bigger than just the legal drinking age. Changing that one variable won't make a big impact IMO.

The best thing that could ever happen to the cigarette business would be increasing the legal smoking age to 21. That puts them in the 'illicit cool things adults do' category. Dropping the age lower to 16 would put it in the realm of childish things.

There's no shortage of data to prove that increasing the driving age to 21 would save a massive amount of lives, although that would reduce car sales. Car wrecks are the leading cause of death for teenagers. Lowering the drinking age would prevent alcoholism and increasing the driving age would save lives but our laws aren't based on data or science.

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