Impact: Alcohol Controls

The easiest response to control youth drinking behaviors and regulate drinking and driving is to enforce alcohol controls which prohibit youths from purchasing, obtaining, and drinking alcohol. Further, “to control” is also to apply severe consequences to the adults who allow it to happen.

However, raising the drinking age to reduce undesirable behaviors and drunk driving is found to be “an indirect and incomplete way to attack the problem” (Mosher, 1980, p.31). Raising the legal drinking age to 25, 30 or 50 may have a significant impact, but 19 is the government’s solution to unjustly point fingers. Youths are being chosen as a “symbolic gesture because of its political impotence and because…there are no major economic consequences..." (Mosher, 1980, p.31). A suitable approach might be to focus on intoxicated drivers in general apart from age and/or social status (http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/cbook/chap10.html).

Moreover, the stringent alcohol controls implemented in the province has proven to produce unintended and undesirable results. The attempt to legislate undesirable alcohol behaviors consequentially provides illicit opportunities for attaining alcohol. Many of these unlawful behaviors are not necessarily performed by illegally purchasing liquor. The activities include brewing one’s own liquor, capitalizing on it, and use it for entertainment and other drug opportunities. The effortlessness of distribution gives rise to bootlegging and smuggling (http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/cbook/chap10.html).

Mosher (1980) has further pointed out that drinking controls and youth-drinking behaviors are incongruent. When alcohol is prohibited in ways which restrict anyone from obtaining it, the use of it declines. Yet, increasing the age of allowing, buying and consuming alcohol has a positive correlation (the stricter the laws or the higher the age to legally buy alcohol, the increase of under-age drinking occurs). Therefore, the most active legislative control on age of purchase it, the more underage drinking is prevalent.