6 ms·

She runs “bartending school” for incoming students during mandatory orientation sessions at Georgia. Handing over a vodka bottle full of water, she asks them to

She runs “bartending school” for incoming students during mandatory orientation sessions at Georgia. Handing over a vodka bottle full of water, she asks them to pour what they think is one drink into a 16-ounce cup. After a discussion of alcohol’s physical effects and consequences, she empties the cups into two-ounce shot glasses. What seemed like one drink is often two or three. In normal countries, teenagers start drinking in a supervised environment (read: Mom and Dad, who won't appreciate that Sonny threw up in his shoe again because he came home way too sozzled to find the toilet bowl), and they start on beer and wine, which makes it much more difficult to overdose. In America the infantilized teenagers go off to college and then proceed to black out on spirits, because spirits are easier to smuggle into the dorm. What could possibly go wrong there? Also: the American problem of trying to get on top of alcohol abuse by limiting availability, when you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility. Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much.

revelation 12y ago
In normal countries, the underage drinking also isn't criminalized. It is illegal to sell alcohol to underage persons, but it's not illegal for said underage person to drink it. That said, I'd love for drunk driving to have harsher penalties. Not jail, but simply driving ban for at least a year with an extended retest (psych eval, as they do in other countries if you lose your license to drunk driving).
- ams6110 12y ago
  DUI is already at least probation + a significant suspension in most states, at least that's my perception. At best, if there was no accident/injury, you get a provisional driving license that will let you go to/from work, and you'll lose that on a 2nd offense. Plus your insurance will go sky-high. It's really not the slap on the wrist it used to be. Simple public intoxication or illegal consumption is, in most cases, something you can have expunged if it's a first offense and you pay the bribe^H^H^H^H^H pre-trial diversion fee.
nemothekid 12y ago
It would take something short of a drunk driving massacre to get the momentum needed to harshly punish drunk driving. Like many laws in America a lot of it emotion driven - a lower drinking age would most likely help the college binge drinking problem, but advocating for such a law means someone is going to call you out on trying to turn the children of America into alcoholics. Likewise, no one wants to be on the other end of the outrage when celebrity/athlete/politician gets 10 years for having a "couple beers" after work (doesn't everyone have a couple beers? thats too harsh! /s).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
robrenaud 12y ago
> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much. Research suggests that you might be wrong. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-driving-and-tax-deductions/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-... > Key quote: “Harsher sanctions to drinking and driving may generate no marginal deterrent effect if drivers’ perceived risks of receiving the punishments are low. Therefore, rather than escalating sanction severity, increasing the probability of detection and/or enforcement may be more effective in reducing drinking and driving.”
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  Harsh sentances for murderers also very likely do not prevent murder. But they do keep known murderers in places where the exposure to potential victims is much lower. By doing so, we have a safer world even if we do not have a significant disincentive to commit murder.
  - robkix 12y ago
    And now you know why the US houses most of the world's prisoners [0]. This is the same thinking that brings the US security theater at its airports. Anything for safety, even if it only mariginally works. [0] https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-crisis https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-...
    - saosebastiao 12y ago
      We aren't the worlds largest jailor because we put murderers in jail. We are because we have made jailable crimes out of benign actions that do not harm other people. Drunk driving is not a benign action that does not hurt other people.
    - revelation 12y ago
      Who's talking about prison? Driving is a privilege. Suspending it, possibly forever, doesn't appraoch custodial sentences.
scott_s 12y ago
Blaming the drinking culture itself - that American kids aren't allowed to drink, and when they do, they don't know how - is a common sentiment. It has an easy narrative, and I think it may be true. But I've never seen anyone attempt to actually verify it. I can construct equally sensible narratives that have nothing to do with the drinking culture. I can also imagine it's not the drinking culture, but the fact that most American kids go away to college. In some other cultures which have more sensible attitudes towards alcohol (and I do think they are more sensible), I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college.
- ics 12y ago
  > I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college Which may also be influenced by the probability of 800 miles away being another country (with an entirely different language).
john_b 12y ago
> "you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility" True, but most American cultural pathologies are rooted in mistrust of others, a mistrust which is itself often rooted in one or more fears that derive from ignorance. When you are ignorant and fearful of a problem or a group of people, it's much easier to appeal to your government to do something about it rather than actually try to understand that problem or people. Trusting those people to be responsible is the last thing that occurs to you in such a state of mind. All I'm trying to say is that this is a specific instance of a much larger trend which has been in place for a long time. I don't know how to fix it.
- baddox 12y ago
  Your comment is itself generalizing and demonstrating ignorance about a very large and diverse group of people.
DanBC 12y ago
Compare to the UK - you can buy alcohol at 18; you can have alcohol on licenced premises with a meal if you're with parents and 16 or over. https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the-law/the-law-on-alcohol-and-under-18s https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the... We have a pretty severe problem with alcohol here. One in five ambulances in London a the weekends are for alcohol related injuries; hospitals in major cities have drunk tanks; cirrhosis is affecting more people and younger people -- and these problems are not in the population of people with alcoholism but in the people who just drink too much. So it'd be interesting to work out how other countries manage it.
- adwf 12y ago
  Yeah, it's always interesting comparing drinking laws. In the UK we've tried to crackdown on underage drinking quite a bit in the past decade or two. But it hasn't really worked particularly well. Part of it is that in their crackdown on drinking, they've massively increased the taxes on alcohol (as if price will stop people partying!). These have really squeezed the little country pubs so much that roughly 30 pubs are closing down every week now. You may think that this is a good thing on the surface, but all it does is drive people (and kids) from the small safe pubs in the villages, to the big venues and clubs in the towns and cities; which are open far later and push far stronger alcohol to maximise sales. And it's the concentration of people in the major drinking towns that leads to a lot of the disorderly behaviour, violence and accidents requiring A&E. Whereas 20-30 years ago, small village pubs were a mainstay of drinking culture. Turning a blind eye to the occasional kid drinking a pint or two was a heck of a lot safer than pushing them into the cities with fake IDs. Or buying litres of spirits and downing them on a park bench. But pubs can't afford to take any risk nowadays, for each 17 year old you accidentally let into the pub, it's a £10k fine for the manager, £5k fine for the barman who serves the kid. Plus a possible revocation of license. Then there's the social downsides of being too strict on drinking for the rest of us. The "Think 25?" campaign is particularly terrible, it catches even people like me at age 30. I can understand that maybe I look under 25, but do I really look 17 years or less - that's what the law says they have to legally look out for after all. That is my legal right. It's insulting and an infringement on basic liberties that we should be able to take for granted. I envisage having to carry ID on me for a good 5-10 years more, unless I grow a beard...
vpeters25 12y ago
> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much. I don't think stricter DUI laws will work, they rely on the absurd idea that a drunk will somehow have enough self-awareness to make a rational decision (not to drive).
baddox 12y ago
Everyone says this, and I wonder if there's any data backing it up. Is there correlation, for instance, between having your first drink after high school and binge drinking? I know everyone likes to say that Americans don't drink until they're in college, but even that certainly doesn't reflect my experience and the general sense I get from talking to other Americans.

revelation 12y ago

In normal countries, the underage drinking also isn't criminalized. It is illegal to sell alcohol to underage persons, but it's not illegal for said underage person to drink it. That said, I'd love for drunk driving to have harsher penalties. Not jail, but simply driving ban for at least a year with an extended retest (psych eval, as they do in other countries if you lose your license to drunk driving).

ams6110 12y ago
DUI is already at least probation + a significant suspension in most states, at least that's my perception. At best, if there was no accident/injury, you get a provisional driving license that will let you go to/from work, and you'll lose that on a 2nd offense. Plus your insurance will go sky-high. It's really not the slap on the wrist it used to be. Simple public intoxication or illegal consumption is, in most cases, something you can have expunged if it's a first offense and you pay the bribe^H^H^H^H^H pre-trial diversion fee.

nemothekid 12y ago

It would take something short of a drunk driving massacre to get the momentum needed to harshly punish drunk driving. Like many laws in America a lot of it emotion driven - a lower drinking age would most likely help the college binge drinking problem, but advocating for such a law means someone is going to call you out on trying to turn the children of America into alcoholics. Likewise, no one wants to be on the other end of the outrage when celebrity/athlete/politician gets 10 years for having a "couple beers" after work (doesn't everyone have a couple beers? thats too harsh! /s).

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

robrenaud 12y ago

> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much. Research suggests that you might be wrong. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-driving-and-tax-deductions/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-... > Key quote: “Harsher sanctions to drinking and driving may generate no marginal deterrent effect if drivers’ perceived risks of receiving the punishments are low. Therefore, rather than escalating sanction severity, increasing the probability of detection and/or enforcement may be more effective in reducing drinking and driving.”

saosebastiao 12y ago
Harsh sentances for murderers also very likely do not prevent murder. But they do keep known murderers in places where the exposure to potential victims is much lower. By doing so, we have a safer world even if we do not have a significant disincentive to commit murder.
- robkix 12y ago
  And now you know why the US houses most of the world's prisoners [0]. This is the same thinking that brings the US security theater at its airports. Anything for safety, even if it only mariginally works. [0] https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-crisis https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-...
  - saosebastiao 12y ago
    We aren't the worlds largest jailor because we put murderers in jail. We are because we have made jailable crimes out of benign actions that do not harm other people. Drunk driving is not a benign action that does not hurt other people.
  - revelation 12y ago
    Who's talking about prison? Driving is a privilege. Suspending it, possibly forever, doesn't appraoch custodial sentences.

scott_s 12y ago

Blaming the drinking culture itself - that American kids aren't allowed to drink, and when they do, they don't know how - is a common sentiment. It has an easy narrative, and I think it may be true. But I've never seen anyone attempt to actually verify it. I can construct equally sensible narratives that have nothing to do with the drinking culture. I can also imagine it's not the drinking culture, but the fact that most American kids go away to college. In some other cultures which have more sensible attitudes towards alcohol (and I do think they are more sensible), I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college.

ics 12y ago
> I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college Which may also be influenced by the probability of 800 miles away being another country (with an entirely different language).

john_b 12y ago

> "you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility" True, but most American cultural pathologies are rooted in mistrust of others, a mistrust which is itself often rooted in one or more fears that derive from ignorance. When you are ignorant and fearful of a problem or a group of people, it's much easier to appeal to your government to do something about it rather than actually try to understand that problem or people. Trusting those people to be responsible is the last thing that occurs to you in such a state of mind. All I'm trying to say is that this is a specific instance of a much larger trend which has been in place for a long time. I don't know how to fix it.

baddox 12y ago
Your comment is itself generalizing and demonstrating ignorance about a very large and diverse group of people.

DanBC 12y ago

Compare to the UK - you can buy alcohol at 18; you can have alcohol on licenced premises with a meal if you're with parents and 16 or over. https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the-law/the-law-on-alcohol-and-under-18s https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the... We have a pretty severe problem with alcohol here. One in five ambulances in London a the weekends are for alcohol related injuries; hospitals in major cities have drunk tanks; cirrhosis is affecting more people and younger people -- and these problems are not in the population of people with alcoholism but in the people who just drink too much. So it'd be interesting to work out how other countries manage it.

adwf 12y ago
Yeah, it's always interesting comparing drinking laws. In the UK we've tried to crackdown on underage drinking quite a bit in the past decade or two. But it hasn't really worked particularly well. Part of it is that in their crackdown on drinking, they've massively increased the taxes on alcohol (as if price will stop people partying!). These have really squeezed the little country pubs so much that roughly 30 pubs are closing down every week now. You may think that this is a good thing on the surface, but all it does is drive people (and kids) from the small safe pubs in the villages, to the big venues and clubs in the towns and cities; which are open far later and push far stronger alcohol to maximise sales. And it's the concentration of people in the major drinking towns that leads to a lot of the disorderly behaviour, violence and accidents requiring A&E. Whereas 20-30 years ago, small village pubs were a mainstay of drinking culture. Turning a blind eye to the occasional kid drinking a pint or two was a heck of a lot safer than pushing them into the cities with fake IDs. Or buying litres of spirits and downing them on a park bench. But pubs can't afford to take any risk nowadays, for each 17 year old you accidentally let into the pub, it's a £10k fine for the manager, £5k fine for the barman who serves the kid. Plus a possible revocation of license. Then there's the social downsides of being too strict on drinking for the rest of us. The "Think 25?" campaign is particularly terrible, it catches even people like me at age 30. I can understand that maybe I look under 25, but do I really look 17 years or less - that's what the law says they have to legally look out for after all. That is my legal right. It's insulting and an infringement on basic liberties that we should be able to take for granted. I envisage having to carry ID on me for a good 5-10 years more, unless I grow a beard...

vpeters25 12y ago

> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much. I don't think stricter DUI laws will work, they rely on the absurd idea that a drunk will somehow have enough self-awareness to make a rational decision (not to drive).

baddox 12y ago

Everyone says this, and I wonder if there's any data backing it up. Is there correlation, for instance, between having your first drink after high school and binge drinking? I know everyone likes to say that Americans don't drink until they're in college, but even that certainly doesn't reflect my experience and the general sense I get from talking to other Americans.