Encyclopedia of Opinion
Question
Should the drinking age be 18?
Position‹4 of 4
There should be no drinking age.
Argument1 of 3›

Underage drinking is not a priority for law enforcement

Law enforcement agencies have better things to do than spend their time and resources handling underage drinkers.

The argument

Police generally have little interest in underage drinking because it is a low-impact crime that would be too demanding on time and resources to pursue aggressively. The prevalence of underage drinking has no significant statistical association with rates of suicide or criminal activity by young adults, and the legal penalties for underage drinking are usually minimal. Consequently, police officers lack both the motive and the means to make combating underage drinking a priority. In the United States, only an estimated 0.2% of incidents of underage drinking result in an arrest.

Premises

[P1]Police lack both motive and means to prioritize underage drinking, as evidenced by only 0.2% of incidents resulting in arrest. [P2] A law that authorities decline to enforce imposes costs and inconsistency without delivering meaningful benefits. [C] Therefore, since the drinking age is effectively unenforced, there is no good reason to maintain any drinking age at all.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that low enforcement is an argument about implementation, not about whether a drinking age should exist. A law can shape behaviour and norms even when arrests are rare — by setting a clear standard, enabling intervention when needed, and giving retailers and parents a legal line — so the 0.2% arrest figure shows selective enforcement, not uselessness. They add that abolishing the age entirely is a large step that does not follow from under-enforcement: the alternative to lax enforcement could be better enforcement, and removing any minimum could increase access for much younger children, whom the law also protects. On this view weak enforcement is a reason to reconsider tactics, not to scrap the age.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A low arrest rate shows the law is lightly enforced, not that it has no effect; laws can shape norms and enable intervention without frequent arrests. [Rejecting P2] That an under-enforced law imposes some costs does not mean the remedy is abolition rather than improved enforcement, so the conclusion does not follow. [Rejecting C] Removing any drinking age would extend legal access to much younger children the law protects, a consequence the under-enforcement premise does not address.