Give Up Blog

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Crap science and sympathy for the alcohol industry

This week in the JCI they want to talk about intelligent design and defend science against it. The second article is really worth a read, and it even has a "This Modern World" cartoon in it which I just love. JCI is really on fire lately, going after Zerhouni and now taking on the IDers.

However, ID doesn't bother me as much as crap science articles such as the one described here. (Here is the article in the journal)

"Almost all (96.8 percent) of the adult drinkers with alcohol abuse and dependence began drinking prior to the age of 21 years," the researchers write. "With at least 37.5 percent of sales linked to underage drinking and adult abusive and dependent drinking, the alcohol industry has a compelling financial motive to attempt to maintain or increase rates of underage drinking. Alcohol advertisements in magazines, for example, expose youth aged 12 to 20 years to 45 percent more beer advertisements and 27 percent more advertisements for distilled spirits than adults of legal drinking age."

This morality masquerading as science funded by the anti-drug anti-alcohol junkies at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse is totally worthless correlative crap. So what, you find that kids who drink before they're 21 are more likely to become dependent on alcohol than those that wait. Big surprise. Did you ever think the people that become dependent on alcohol would be the same group if you raised the drinking age to 40 or lowered it to 8? Everybody drinks before 21, only a tiny minority of teetotalers waits until they're 21 before they lose their alcoholic virginity and if they wait that long, they'll probably never drink much because they're not the type of people who would ever be interested in alcohol, not because they just have so much respect for the law that they wait.

How is this a valid comparison? How does this compare to every other country in the freaking world without a drinking age? The answer is it doesn't, the study is invalid as long as it is performed in this country, and not designed as a cohort or case-control study. There is no meaningful relationship between the age of onset of drinking and alcoholism, sorry. There is probably a much better relationship between having a high drinking age and drinking to excess, drinking and driving, and general underaged alcoholic stupidity.

Seriously people, get a life. If you're devoting your life to this kind of correlative "won't someone please think of the children" crap research please find another job.

3 Comments:

minimalist said...

Not to mention the fact that the high drinking age probably actively contributes to irresponsible drinking in under-21s.

Say you have an 18 year old, off to college for the first time and free of any parental supervision. WHEEE, PARTY TIME! However, he can only drink in clandestine keggers free of any adult supervision. Next thing you know everything is all BLARRRRGGH and HOOOOORGH and DID YOU TOUCH MY GIRL I'LL KICK YOUR FUCKIBLAAAAARGGGHHH and OH GOD I CAN'T SEE, THE BLOOD THE BLOOD

Let an 18 year old drink in a bar, and at least there's a chance that there will be a reasonable adult there (the bartender) who can cut them off, and they can possibly learn their limits in a slightly more responsible, controlled environment. Not to mention that it takes away some of the thrill of doing something "forbidden", which in turn would spur more irresponsible behavior.

Lowering the drinking age certainly wouldn't eliminate these problems entirely (for the reasons you rightly state) but I doubt it would make them any worse, and most likely would help more than a bit. Once again its our Puritanical repression, where urges have to be repressed and compressed into little balls of festering neuroses, that is a significant couse of thise sort of aberrant behavior. America really needs a more healthy attitude toward "fun" in general.

1:27 PM, May 02, 2006

Anonymous said...

May I say thank you, Rev. Dr. and minimalist, for stating the obvious, which so few seem to "get".

I think a still better suggestion would be to make alcohol consumption (and that of other not-terribly-addictive substances, like marijuana) something like admission to an R-rated movie: 17-or-so and up, it can be done legally on your own. Less than that, under supervision of a guardian. (Ideally, this could be transferred to other adults of the parents' choosing, as well.)

Thus, we would be decriminalizing parents who choose to actually teach and allow their offspring to practice responsibility, and taking many young people's first exposure to the stuff from unsupervised parties, not even to bartenders, but to parents, and while the young'uns are still at an impressionable age.

I don't trust parents as a group that much, but I trust them a heck of a lot more than I trust bureaucrats. My personal philosophy: Give Up on government intervention.

--steve

7:24 PM, May 02, 2006

minimalist said...

Yeah, my parents were letting me have beer with dinner since the age of about 15 or 16. It was never "forbidden fruit" in my house, some mysterious Key to Adulthood; no thrill of sneaking around The Man to get a taste; it was just a fact. (Dad was a bit of a beer snob, but Genny Cream Ale was always easy on the teenage palate, and is still a favorite cheap, everyday beer of mine.)

Hell, the first (and only) time I got stinking, puking drunk was after 1st year grad school finals, and I was sufficiently repulsed by the experience to never do it again. That may also be because I am very boring and have a very boring life, but still.

Anyway, point is, I like your idea, Steve. There will always be jackass parents who abuse the system, like those knuckleheads who throw out-of-control keggers for their kids, but often that's due as much to those absentee parents wanting to seem "cool" to their kids. Again, take away the stigma of under-21 drinking and a lot of that incentive would probably drain away.

9:23 AM, May 03, 2006