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alocohol drinking age should be lowered
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
i think it should be, simply because it would encourage a more responsible approach to drinking if approached well as a law i dont know, say non-distilled alcohol from a licensed premises and/or if purchased with an adult in company or something like that
spelling mistake in title, apoligises
spelling mistake in title, apoligises
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id poke a guess at the reason most adults get plastered of a weekend is because they're the most overworked population in the world (bar japan) and feel like some proper escapism
16 year olds can drink in pubs if accompanied by adults anyway cant they? So lowering the drinking limit will just allow them to buy from off licenses with potentially NO supervision
Also children over 5 can be given alcohol by an adult in the home
so i dont see what lowering it will acheive to be honest :chin:
For once, Hazel Blears is right.
Lowering the drinking age will just mean that underage drinking starts a little bit earlier...
Personally, I'd like to see vastly increased duties on nasty chemical filled alcopops and reduced duty on beer produced by small breweries. And when I'm 21 I'd probably support raising the age to 21 for everything except beer and wine. I think that might help.
How do you explain student drinking for example?
An ancient tradition?
Correlation is not causation.......
:yes:
If the drinking age was lowered, what exactly would it achieve? Like someone has said, it would possibly mean that underage drinking will start earlier.
We never had a problem with that, even tho many start to drink beer a tad younger. I started around 15...
/e: I agree with skive with the attitude towards drinking. I haven't lived in the UK at drinking age, but let alone from what I read about it on this site, it seems people see the weekend as their life raft to get so fucking sloshed that they can't even lie flat on the ground without grabbing something for halt. I don't say it does not happen over here, but not that much and not in that extent.
Maybe it's just me being foreign to the clubbing scene, but afaik 'normal' people don't take anywhere as much drugs, but anyhoo, that exceeds the topic.
But I wouldn't lower it to 16 at all, if anything I'd put it up to 21.
People's bodies aren't developed at 16 (and no doubt this would make it easier for 13 year olds to get served) and they shouldn't be encouraged to drink. Wouldn't the risk of damage to their bodies be greater than that of an 18 year old?
Also, can you imagine the clubs? The amount of people who will get in trouble for having sex with underaged girls. Eek! :crazyeyes
i started at 6, everyone i know who was able to drink from a young age at family house dos has landed up alright
itswhn you try to restrain kids
no thats why theres over 21 clubs as well, as well as under 18 nights
With the exception of a few clubs which let 16 year olds in and stamp the hands of anyone who's over 18 to get access to alcohol, clubs are generally 18 plus because they sell booze and people get pissed.
Bleh!
Of course they don't sell alcohol, otherwise they would be breaking the law. I think most places stick to the over 18 law where as some clubs chose to leave nights free for certain social groups. The Oceana in Leeds has student nights on Mon and Wed for students only (18+ obviously) but I think a Saturday is over 19's and over 21's night.
Unlikely.
If you accept young drinking as a given, then it doesn't matter if its legal or not, teenagers are going to drink.
Given that, I'd like to see the age lowered for certain drinks (normal beer and cider, but not spirits or alcopops over 4.5% vol), simply so that the younger people can come inside the pubs and drink in relative safety. I'd rather that 16-year-olds were drinking in the pub rather than standing on the street corner and in the bus shelter swigging white lightning. They'd get into much less mischief in a pub playing pool.
A lot of the problems with drinking in Britain come from the fact that alcohol and getting pissed is seen as "adult", and therefore teenagers want to do it as much as possible as early as possible. Where alcohol isn't seen as an adult thing, the problems are much less noted. In the UK drinking is seen as competition- the one who drinks the most is the most adult and "manly".
Germany has a drinking culture, but it isn't a binge-drinking culture, and drinking is not seen as a competitive sport there. That's why its so much nicer to drink in Germany.
I've only really become more sensible about drinking in the last year or so. Most teenagers have no sense of taste and just go for sweet things that don't taste of alcohol.
I don't agree with the idea..even though I started drinking at 13 myself.
It might just help tone down the binge drinking culture, which is almost always spirit fuelled.
Indeed.
This is the problem. To have a situation where we don't worry about this, like seen in many countries round the world, Britain is going to have to change drastically, and lose our apraoch to things. We are going to have to adopt the culture seen elsewhere.
We can't just have a high stress lifestyle and pretend our problems don't exist, and have easily availible alcohol. Then we'd be an even worse nation of bingers.
I could walk into a shop and buy alcohol at 14, not wine but hard liquour. One night I was buying it for a party and bought 4 litres of vodka and crates of beer without even a second look.
This is where the problem is.
But how do you outbreed so to speak, something which is so accepted? Surely it would take years to convince people not to binge drink.
And surely it has something, maybe cause maybe effect, to do with the fact that Briton is such a depressed nation.
That's not where the problem is at all.
I've been drinking alcohol since I was three, my dad used to give me some of his beer watered down with lemonade, but I'm not a hard drinker and I never have been.
It's about how children are raised to see alcohol- I've always been taught that alcohol is nice, it tastes nice and makes you feel nice, but not drinking too much is important. The reason why the rest of Europe doesn't have the hard-boozing culture is exactly because people can drink at a younger age over there- you can drink at 14 or 16 in much of Europe, provided you stay off the spirits.
I would happily see it that children aged 14 to 18 can drink alcohol up to a certain limit, say drinks less than 4.5% ABV. I think it would remove the mystique of alcohol, and letting them drink in pubs with their mates, a jukebox and a pool table would curb a lot of antisocial behaviour.
Going back to the original topic, I think if we have a law that says you have to be 18 to buy alcohol, we should stick to it a lot more rigidly than we do at the moment. A lot of underage drinking is to do with being cool, and getting away with buying alcohol when you're only 15 or 16 fuels that because it makes you feel adult, like you've got away with something you shouldn't really have been allowed to. That's certainly a factor to consider, anyway. But I agree with people who've said drinking (not spirits though) should be allowed from 16 in pubs as kids are probably going to drink anyway and it's better they've got somewhere to go rather than loitering on the streets or in parks.