Is There Apple Juice in My Wine?: Thirty-Eight Laws that Affect the Wine You Drink by Jordan Lipp & Heather Lipp

Author:Jordan Lipp & Heather Lipp [Lipp, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-20T18:30:00+00:00

chapter 27

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Why a Twenty-Year-Old Can Be Drafted, Vote, Run a Company, and Buy Cigarettes, But Cannot Taste Wine.

If you live in the United States and are twenty-years-old, you can vote. You can buy cigarettes. You can run a company. You can be drafted (if you are male). But, you cannot taste wine.

The twenty-one-year-old minimum drinking age in the United States is among the highest in the world.1 Indeed, the United States is tied with the following countries for having the highest nationwide drinking age in the world – Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Kiribati, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nauru, Oman, Palau, Samoa, and Sri Lanka.2 In all fairness, there are some (predominantly Muslim) countries that ban alcohol outright, as well as Utah. Okay, we made the part about Utah up. It’s not a country. And, Utah doesn’t technically ban alcohol, though sometimes it sure feels like it.

As an aside, you shouldn’t be too shocked that some countries in the world ban alcohol outright as over half the states in America have one or more counties and/or municipalities that are completely dry.3 That means those locations completely ban the sale of alcohol. Perhaps our laws are closer to those in Afghanistan than we’d like to admit.

In any event, of the 175 countries or so on the planet that permit alcohol, the United States has the highest national minimum drinking age.4 How did this happen? And, what exactly does our twenty-one-year-old minimum drinking age mean? For example, can a twenty-year-old legally drink at home?

Let’s start with how it happened. The Prohibitionist movement in this country ebbs and flows, and after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the neo-Prohibitionists hit their high-water mark in the 1980s. First Lady Nancy Reagan led an all-out assault on alcohol throughout her husband’s presidency in the 1980s.5 Along with the “Just Say No” and DARE programs, in 1984, Congress enacted the National Minimum Drinking Age Act.6 The stated reason behind the Act was that the varying minimum drinking ages between the states prior to 1984 was causing “an incentive” for young people to drink and drive because “young persons commuted to border States where the drinking age [was] lower.”7 Sounds like pretty specious reasoning to us.

Although commonly thought of as creating a minimum drinking age (as both the title of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, and even the title of this very chapter suggests), Congress did not ban consumption of alcohol by people under the age of twenty-one outright. Rather, the law technically banned only “the purchase or public possession” of alcohol by people under twenty-one.8

An astute reader might start to think, considering the United States is a federal system where alcohol regulation is left to the states, and considering national Prohibition required a constitutional amendment – how could the Congress of the United States raise the drinking age?9 After all, isn’t this an issue that is (and should be) left to each state legislature?

The answer is that Congress didn’t technically raise the drinking age. Rather,

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