A wine label showing a nude nymph is too much for Alabama's liquor control agency, which has told restaurants and stores not to sell the product.Alabama is right, kids don't need to be seeing that kind of thing when they're drinking.
The label on Cycles Gladiator wine, produced by Hahn Family Wines in Soledad, Calif., shows a vintage 1895 advertising poster for Cycles Gladiator bicycles. The French poster features a nude nymph flying beside a winged bicycle.
Bob Martin, staff attorney for the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, said the board's license bureau rejected the label last year as inappropriate for sale in the state. Early this month, a citizen sent a bottle of the wine to the board's enforcement bureau to show it was being sold in stores, he said.
"Legal Age 21 has not worked." Of course, any 20-year-old could, and probably would, tell you that. But the quote in question was written by Dr. Morris Chafet, a psychiatrist who served on the presidential committee that pushed to have the legal drinking age raised to 21. That push paid off on July 17, 1984, when President Ronald Reagan signed the new drinking age into law.Abolish it.
Since that time, however, Chafet has apparently had a change of heart. The Los Angeles Times reports that in an editorial that has yet to be published, Chafet describes his effort to raise the drinking age as the "single most regrettable decision" of his career. "To be sure, drunk driving fatalities are lower now than they were in 1982," Chafet notes. "But they are lower in all age groups. And they have declined just as much in Canada, where the age is 18 or 19, as they have in the United States."
That observation, while welcome, hardly warrants a "better late than never" response. As Chafet also notes in his piece, the arbitrary age restriction is partially to blame for things like binge drinking, injury, and property destruction.
Simply passing a law isn't going to stop young adults from drinking, an activity that has long been a sign of adulthood. Yet because of the fear of punishment, those young adults are much less likely to seek help when the partying gets out of hand, and the results are frequently disastrous. Furthermore, underage drinking only breeds disrespect for the law. So much for keeping people safe.
Chafet may be 25 years too late. But here's hoping he can use whatever influence he has left to push for lowering the drinking age, if not abolishing it all together.
America is one of only four counties in the world with a 21-year-old drinking age. The rest of the Western world, including Europe, Canada and Mexico, has lower drinking ages.
Dempsey is one elected official who thinks that the higher drinking age doesn’t stop young people from drinking. He believes it leads to reckless drinking, that young adults sneak alcohol behind the law and their parents’ backs, drink to excess, and then make stupid decisions. He’d like to see the age returned to 18.
“It would get rid of the need for binge drinking,” Dempsey said. “They would still party, but right now it’s, drink as much as you can as fast as you can while we have this illegal drug.”
Critics, such as the one featured in this Politico article, fail to comprehend terrorism as a strategy. Thus, they are locked into counterproductive policies like secrecy and torture.Yglesias and Frum marvel at conservative paranoia.
Let’s start with the strategic logic of terrorism: By goading strong powers into overreaction and error, terrorism weakens those powers and strengthens itself. Among other things, overreaction and misdirection on the part of the strong power draw sympathy and support to terrorists as it confirms the terrorist narrative that they are in a struggle against evil powers.
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"Marijuana is the (Mexican cartels') cash crop, the cash cow," says Brittany Brown of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Washington office, which does not advocate legalizing pot.Stem the violence: re-legalize it.
Marijuana is cheap to grow and requires no processing. More than a million pounds of it was seized in Arizona in each of the past two years, according to figures provided by Ramona Sanchez of the DEA's Phoenix office. But those seizures were just a cost of doing business for multibillion-dollar drug lords. Marijuana continued to be widely available - and not just to adults.
Teens tell researchers that buying pot is easier than getting cigarettes or booze, says Bill Piper, director of National Affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which does advocate legalizing marijuana.
Some argue that if you legalize marijuana there would still be a black market. They say that because the product is so cheap to produce, the black market could underprice legal pot and sell to kids. But consider what we know about alcohol.
• First, Prohibition didn't work.
• Second, even though alcohol sales are regulated, back-alley or school-yard sales of moonshine is not a billion-dollar problem.
• Third, alcohol, like its addictive killer-cousin tobacco, is taxed, which helps cover its costs to society.
Not so with marijuana.
After decades of anti-pot campaigns, from Reefer Madness to zero tolerance, so many Americans choose to smoke marijuana that the Mexican cartels have become an international threat to law and order.
Instead of paying taxes on their vice, pot smokers are enriching thugs and murderers.
"People who smoke pot in the United States don't think they are connected to the cartels," Brown says. "Actually, they are very connected."
American drug users help sharpen the knives that cartel henchmen use to behead their enemies and terrorize Mexican border towns.
Even marijuana grown in the United States, increasingly in national parks and on other public lands, is often connected to Mexican cartels, Brown says.
According to the Justice Department's 2009 assessment, cartels have "established varied transportation routes, advanced communications capabilities and strong affiliations with gangs in the United States" and "maintain drug-distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities." Including Phoenix and Tucson.
The DEA says cartels are "poly-drug organizations" that routinely smuggle cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and precursor chemicals through our state.
"(But) marijuana generates the most profit," Sanchez says
At one point in the segment, Lesley Stahl suggests that the “conundrum” for policymakers is that raising the drinking age has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but may be contributing to fatalities associated with underage binge drinking.Education is always good. And Prohibition bad, even when it only applies to under-21s. All data I've seen supports these principles on balance.
But there may not be a conundrum at all. When I interviewed McCardell for the February issue of Reason, he explained why the argument that raising the drinking age is responsible for the 20-year drop in highway deaths doesn’t hold water:There has been a decline in traffic fatalities. But it began in 1982, two years before the law changed. It has basically been flat or inching upward for the last decade.Not to mention the enormously successful public awareness campaign Mothers Against Drunk Driving began in the early 1980s. MADD today has veered off into neoprohibition. But there’s no question their PR campaign changed attitudes about drunk driving.
More interestingly, the decline has come in every age group, not just people between 18 and 21. And if you look at Canada, where the minimum drinking age is 18 or 19 [depending on the province], the trend in highway fatalities has almost exactly paralleled ours. It’s far more likely that the reduction in deaths is due to seat belt use, airbags, and safer cars.
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