Underage drinking is not a priority for law enforcement

The argument

The argument is about enforcement rather than about the merits of drinking at any particular age. 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. Enforcing it means detecting a private, dispersed and momentary act — one that leaves no complainant and no scene to attend — which makes it among the most resource-intensive categories of policing for the smallest return. Two further considerations remove whatever incentive might remain. The prevalence of underage drinking has no significant statistical association with rates of suicide or criminal activity by young adults, so the downstream harms that would justify diverting resources toward it do not appear in the data that would have to establish them. And the legal penalties for underage drinking are usually minimal, meaning that even a successful enforcement action ends in an outcome too slight to be worth the hours spent obtaining it. Consequently, police officers lack both the motive and the means to make combating underage drinking a priority. The scale of the resulting gap is what makes the point concrete rather than impressionistic. In the United States, only an estimated 0.2% of incidents of underage drinking result in an arrest. A rule enforced in two cases out of every thousand is not operating as a prohibition; it is operating as a formality, and the behaviour it addresses continues essentially unaffected by its existence. That is the basis for dispensing with a drinking age altogether. A law nominally in force which those charged with applying it decline to apply delivers none of the protection claimed for it, while still exposing the small and effectively arbitrary fraction who are caught to a penalty that nobody else incurs for identical conduct.

Premises

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.