Random Return of the Drinking Age Argument

By Karl Klockars in News on Nov 21, 2008 9:45PM

We thought that July's rash of stories about the Amethyst Initiative and lowering the drinking age had come and gone, but last night CBS 2's Rob Johnson* brought back the age-old question: should we lower the drinking age to 18? And we were all set to spend about 300 words bashing CBS for not checking their fax machine in about 4 months, but lo and behold, across the nation there have been a wave of stories about Amethyst in the past couple weeks. Either people are really curious about the idea of 18-year-olds getting tanked, or Amethyst has a pretty solid PR person with a lot of illicit photos of news desk editors across the country.

But truth be told, we've scanned a number of the stories, and can't figure out for the life of us why this was seeing the light of day on a Thursday night in November. (Maybe it's because it's a Friday and we've been drinking since noon.) Is it because next Wednesday is one of the biggest bar-going nights of the year, especially for students returning home from school and going out to see friends they haven't hung out with for a few months. We all have Thanksgiving holiday keg-party stories, right? Someone's out of town, a random basement opens up, there's a couple handles of booze down there, one thing leads to another and you're vomiting in a park after falling off the tire swing? Happens to all of us. So if you can give us a better guess, we're all ears.

Rather than rehash the whole debate about college kids (or those 18-year-old high school seniors) being able to go pick up their 30-bricks of High Life [Ed.'s Note: Or Chicagoist Editors picking up 30-bricks of High Life...-M.G.], we're going to start a brand new initiative - raise the drinking age to be 2 years older than me, permanently. I know I did all my best boozing at 19, and it was way more fun to be outlaw drinkin'.

* We reached out to Rob to see what his motivation was for bringing this back to the forefront - if we hear from him, we'll pass on his answer.

Stop & Drink from abbyworld.