Underage drinking hurts...
..People who are underage.
There is an article in my local college paper today entitled "Underage drinking hurts economy" by Darryn Beckstrom. This girl is the Editorial Board Chair of the Badger Herald, and has been on the staff at that paper for at least a year and a half. This girl's compositions have never ceased to piss me off; so much in fact I generally try to avoid the opinion section of the paper routinely and only pick the paper up for the high quality comic strips they some how manage to keep.
I will quote excerpts for me to respond to; the article is linked here : Underage drinking hurts economy
"Wisconsin unfortunately does not have a strong dram shop law — which allows one to hold an establishment financially liable for damage a patron may cause after becoming heavily intoxicated. Yet bartenders can still be held liable for providing underage drinkers with alcohol. And taverns can also be held civilly liable for the damage caused by an underage patron if it is found that they have not checked identification with a “good faith effort.”"
So Wisconsin does the right thing by not punishing bars financially liable for overly intoxicated patrons. And the bartenders can lose their job...if they don't check for proper ID. This is the underagers fault? This is not a situation where grey area exists, the patron comes in, generally getting carded before stepping 4 ft into a bar, or at the bar by the bartender himself. The employee makes a decision from here on the validity of the ID. The patron is promptly given a drink or kicked out. If they drink and a police officer coincidentally comes in and asks for the drinkers ID and then it proved fraudulent, the offender is fined, the officer asks the bartender, "Do you check his ID?" Clearly the bartender did in this case, the employee is happy to have the underager out of the establishment.
I feel no sympathy for the bartender who get a ticket, or fired for not checking ID, or habitually letting underagers with poor IDs in. Thats simply a case of someone not doing the job they are suppose to do. How does that constitute the employee as the "victim" of the underager's crime?
Next point: According to a widely cited study by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, the costs of underage drinking are estimated at more than $58 billion annually. And this amount does not include the cost of enforcement or prevention of underage drinking.
I wont even begin to estimate how much profit is made at bars and liquor stores by underage purchases; That figure cannot possibly include "cost of enforcement or prevention of underage drinking" because the Madison police department makes no secret of the impossibility of writing as many underage drinking tickets they can; in fact they were quoted saying as such in very same paper not more than 2 day ago. Underage drinking tickets are mainly given in situations where other violations have occurred, underage drinking tickets most often are paired with disorderly conduct related tickets, the police do not spend their rounds giving Breathalyzer tests to random pedestrians on State Street.
Onward: Often, a person’s prefrontal cortex portion of their brain — which controls such functions as providing a person with the ability to use judgment and reason — does not completely develop until they reach their early 20s. This helps to explain why college students do not always make the smartest decisions. Alcohol does nothing more than retard the ability to use sound judgment and reason even more.
Her reasoning that the drinking age is 21. My only response can be; and yet with our unsound decisions, we can be entrusted to defend this nation's freedoms and the citizens who enjoy those freedoms. An 18 year old has EVERY legal responsibility that a 21 year old; and yet drinking is illegal. I'll consider 21 to be a proper drinking age only when a 20 year old doesn't have to worry about being drafted.
Continuing: Police officers were also making fewer house calls in the middle of the night to tell parents their son or daughter had been killed by a drunk driver.
I would LOVE to see where Darryrn has her numbers from.
Yet more: The Court in Dole was correct in asserting that withholding five percent of federal highway funds from states that did not increase their drinking age to 21 was not compulsion, but rather only “mild encouragement.” States can take the carrot — but by no means are they forced to eat it.
By a quick cursory google search of "federal highway funds received by Wisconsin" turned up an article that said for the construction of pedestrian walkways/ bike paths, along with highway related funds, for Wisconsin's FOURTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT ONLY was over $60 million in federal grants. That would be $3 million in funds gone if Wisconsin decided to change its drinking age again; excuse me for being crass but "mild encouragement" my fucking underage ass.
Nearing the end: the states’ rights thinkers among us who argue the law violates the Tenth Amendment and an individual state’s autonomy should be more concerned with asking why states are even taking federal money in the first place.
It was my understanding it was the federal government's job to support the states.
Lastly: Often, underage students feel they need a fake ID to get them into bars so they can hang out with their older friends. It is unfortunate, though, that socializing on this campus needs to revolve around beer and the retched stench of fermenting yeast.
I won't even stoop down to blast the author on their apparent distaste for beer and overly personal opinion on the smell of bars and any drinking. I simply wonder why bother to end the article with such high horsed personal hatred of drinking in general rather than some kind of solution to solve the "problem" of underage drinking or alternative to it.
If you are going to decry something as a pervasive problem, offer solutions. Darryn doesn't offer anything but flimsy justification for a law that keeps thirsty people out of bars and a platform for her distaste of drinking at any age.
As a final note; I'd like to note how little this artical actually did to claim underage drinking hurts the economy, on any scale: local, regional, statewide or nationally. And how much is it mearly an unwarented defense of the current drinking laws.
There is an article in my local college paper today entitled "Underage drinking hurts economy" by Darryn Beckstrom. This girl is the Editorial Board Chair of the Badger Herald, and has been on the staff at that paper for at least a year and a half. This girl's compositions have never ceased to piss me off; so much in fact I generally try to avoid the opinion section of the paper routinely and only pick the paper up for the high quality comic strips they some how manage to keep.
I will quote excerpts for me to respond to; the article is linked here : Underage drinking hurts economy
"Wisconsin unfortunately does not have a strong dram shop law — which allows one to hold an establishment financially liable for damage a patron may cause after becoming heavily intoxicated. Yet bartenders can still be held liable for providing underage drinkers with alcohol. And taverns can also be held civilly liable for the damage caused by an underage patron if it is found that they have not checked identification with a “good faith effort.”"
So Wisconsin does the right thing by not punishing bars financially liable for overly intoxicated patrons. And the bartenders can lose their job...if they don't check for proper ID. This is the underagers fault? This is not a situation where grey area exists, the patron comes in, generally getting carded before stepping 4 ft into a bar, or at the bar by the bartender himself. The employee makes a decision from here on the validity of the ID. The patron is promptly given a drink or kicked out. If they drink and a police officer coincidentally comes in and asks for the drinkers ID and then it proved fraudulent, the offender is fined, the officer asks the bartender, "Do you check his ID?" Clearly the bartender did in this case, the employee is happy to have the underager out of the establishment.
I feel no sympathy for the bartender who get a ticket, or fired for not checking ID, or habitually letting underagers with poor IDs in. Thats simply a case of someone not doing the job they are suppose to do. How does that constitute the employee as the "victim" of the underager's crime?
Next point: According to a widely cited study by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, the costs of underage drinking are estimated at more than $58 billion annually. And this amount does not include the cost of enforcement or prevention of underage drinking.
I wont even begin to estimate how much profit is made at bars and liquor stores by underage purchases; That figure cannot possibly include "cost of enforcement or prevention of underage drinking" because the Madison police department makes no secret of the impossibility of writing as many underage drinking tickets they can; in fact they were quoted saying as such in very same paper not more than 2 day ago. Underage drinking tickets are mainly given in situations where other violations have occurred, underage drinking tickets most often are paired with disorderly conduct related tickets, the police do not spend their rounds giving Breathalyzer tests to random pedestrians on State Street.
Onward: Often, a person’s prefrontal cortex portion of their brain — which controls such functions as providing a person with the ability to use judgment and reason — does not completely develop until they reach their early 20s. This helps to explain why college students do not always make the smartest decisions. Alcohol does nothing more than retard the ability to use sound judgment and reason even more.
Her reasoning that the drinking age is 21. My only response can be; and yet with our unsound decisions, we can be entrusted to defend this nation's freedoms and the citizens who enjoy those freedoms. An 18 year old has EVERY legal responsibility that a 21 year old; and yet drinking is illegal. I'll consider 21 to be a proper drinking age only when a 20 year old doesn't have to worry about being drafted.
Continuing: Police officers were also making fewer house calls in the middle of the night to tell parents their son or daughter had been killed by a drunk driver.
I would LOVE to see where Darryrn has her numbers from.
Yet more: The Court in Dole was correct in asserting that withholding five percent of federal highway funds from states that did not increase their drinking age to 21 was not compulsion, but rather only “mild encouragement.” States can take the carrot — but by no means are they forced to eat it.
By a quick cursory google search of "federal highway funds received by Wisconsin" turned up an article that said for the construction of pedestrian walkways/ bike paths, along with highway related funds, for Wisconsin's FOURTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT ONLY was over $60 million in federal grants. That would be $3 million in funds gone if Wisconsin decided to change its drinking age again; excuse me for being crass but "mild encouragement" my fucking underage ass.
Nearing the end: the states’ rights thinkers among us who argue the law violates the Tenth Amendment and an individual state’s autonomy should be more concerned with asking why states are even taking federal money in the first place.
It was my understanding it was the federal government's job to support the states.
Lastly: Often, underage students feel they need a fake ID to get them into bars so they can hang out with their older friends. It is unfortunate, though, that socializing on this campus needs to revolve around beer and the retched stench of fermenting yeast.
I won't even stoop down to blast the author on their apparent distaste for beer and overly personal opinion on the smell of bars and any drinking. I simply wonder why bother to end the article with such high horsed personal hatred of drinking in general rather than some kind of solution to solve the "problem" of underage drinking or alternative to it.
If you are going to decry something as a pervasive problem, offer solutions. Darryn doesn't offer anything but flimsy justification for a law that keeps thirsty people out of bars and a platform for her distaste of drinking at any age.
As a final note; I'd like to note how little this artical actually did to claim underage drinking hurts the economy, on any scale: local, regional, statewide or nationally. And how much is it mearly an unwarented defense of the current drinking laws.
posted by Marc at
12:43 PM
1 Comments:
Wisconsin DOES have a dram shop law. I sat through a 4 hour presentation at work in Sheboygan in order to be able to sell alcohol at my checkout, and they spent a good hour of it threatening us with losing our jobs if someone came in already drunk trying to buy more booze and we didn't do the "right thing." We were told to do two things:
1. Don't sell them more.
2. Do whatever it takes to make sure they get home safely. Call them a cab, make them sit and wait, call one of their family members, whatever.
EVEN IF THEY DIDN'T BUY ANY ALCOHOL FROM US we could be held legally and finacially responsible if they got in an accident driving themselves home. Apparently all you have to do to take responsibility off of yourself in this state is to walk into a place that sells alcohol, let them see you're hammered, then get in your car and do whatever you want to. Since they saw you, it's their fault they let you go.
By
Catherine, at 12:42 PM
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