>>I just figure in the laws of the land, if a person is old enough to kill for the state, he/she ought to be considered old enough to drink.
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>Sure, that makes sense. But the car crash fatality rates involving young drunk drivers are pretty concerning. I know you can't generalize.
I once heard that "if 30% of accidents are caused by drunk drivers, that means that 70% are caused by sober ones".
Which only means that statistics can be tossed many ways to make different kinds of salads.
> Some can handle it responsibly at that age, some can't.
One thing that we learned early on was that nobody really cared how much we drank, as long as nobody saw. Being from different parts of town (high schools were specialized, not by district) we didn't meet as much at private parties (as became de rigeur a decade later) but loitered in the main street (is still legal, and a proud part of the tradition) and would get drunk by sneaking drinks here and there, because our pocket money, put together, could match the grocery prices but not tavern prices - and they had all the wrong music in taverns anyway. By age of 18 we all pretty much knew our limits, how to stay afoot, how to stay in touch with reality etc. And there was always at least two or three friends who'd walk you home. I was walked home like that exactly once. I'm not saying I never got drunk again, but not like that. I always managed to walk home, and come to think of it, I don't think I ever reached a count of 50. Probably somewhere around 30 it wasn't interesting anymore.
Epilogue: I still have the last two beers in the fridge, from the dozen we bought in... mmm, was it November or October? And just a month ago one friend of my class was buried after six weeks of alcoholic coma, just skin and bones. She and her husband were already in two car accidents caused by booze, and she just got off her crutches. I even saw her dance on the last reunion video. I guess November melancholy pushed her a bit too deep (November as sung by Tom Waits) and by December she just went under.
