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Raise the Drinking Age, Good Idea?
| Opinion by Matt WoodCan kids be stopped drinking by making them wait longer before they can legally do it?
The South African government plans on raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 in a bid to curb both underage drinking and alcohol abuse, but will this really have any effect?One could say that if kids really want to drink, and are under the age of 18 anyway, they’ll still find a way to do it, and that those of 18, 19 and 20 will still get drunk – just illegally.
One could also say that the problem lies not with the legal drinking age but with underage drinking itself, and government should focus on quashing that problem, as well as educating people about the dangers of alcohol abuse, instead of making new laws that will probably be ignored anyway.
A new survey by Synovate, however, showed that two-thirds of the 500 South African respondents polled in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria were in favour of raising the drinking age, believing it would have positive results in addressing underage drinking, alcohol abuse, drunken driving and domestic violence.
When asked whether underage drinking was a problem in South Africa, 90 percent of the respondents replied that it was, which to me begs the question: Just how is increasing the legal drinking age going to stop this?
Of the 500 participants, 78 percent said they believed it was the government’s responsibility to protect children from the social disease. But the fact is that criminalising alcohol does not treat the problem as a disease but rather a crime.
America, who many, many years ago launched the War on Drugs, now claim to have lost the fight and many states are in the process of legalising marijuana. Another factor to take into consideration is the stringent legislation and law in America, so bad that it has seen more people (expressed as a percentage of the population) imprisoned than any other country. Treating problems like drug and alcohol abuse as crimes instead of diseases – like is done in countries in Europe – just leads to overcrowded prisons.
So if what’s happening in America is anything to go by, passing laws that criminalise substance abuse is eventually going to backfire.
And what they could have done differently – what we should do differently – is really quite obvious.
Source: www.bizpremises.co.za
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