There’s a push to raise the drinking age in Australia. Its advocates cite evidence that the human brain doesn’t stop developing until age 25, so we need to prevent people from drinking before 25. But they want to raise it to 21, because, you know, screw the last 4 years of brain development anyway (those ones are for losers!): it’s between the last 7-5 that are important! And we know that because doctors prescribe dangerous, addictive Schedule II amphetamines to elementary school children for years, just because they have too much energy for adults to keep up with, and that’s considered fine. So then it really must only be some of the pre-25 years that are important for brain development. And apparently, like the elementary school years, 21-25 are no big deal.
But if they really want kids not to drink, what they ought to do is leave it legal (so it won’t seem cool to break the rules, man), and require kids to drink shots on their 10th birthday (and every birthday after that) so they get a raging hangover: then they will avoid it like the plague (until they get peer-pressured into doing it to themselves again in college, which will occur whether there’s a higher drinking age or not, so why bother fighting it?).
