The " Alcohol " question !

The Federal government is under pressure to adopt either or both of two approaches on the consumption of alcohol by young people.

One school of though suggests hiking the price to restrict access and the other wants the legal drinking age raised from eighteen to twenty-one.

There is no doubt that we have an alcohol problem and that binge drinking by young people is both a source of danger and a health hazard. The big unanswered question is why the proponents think either of these options would bring about change ?

Twenty-one used to be the legal drinking age - until the Vietnam war raised an interesting question.

Why was it legal to conscript a young man on his eighteenth birthday, hand him a gun and a uniform - and sent him away to war, and at the same time insist that he was not mature enough to either have a drink or vote for an elected representative in government ?

The answer to that was to reduce the majority age to eighteen.

The price hike suggestion is nothing more than a opportunistic tax grab. It would be a collective punishment for the overwhelming majority of adult drinkers who do not abuse alcohol under the thinly disguised cover of righting a social wrong.

The suggestion of increasing the legal age to drink alcohol to twenty-one would simply introduce a new offence for our badly over worked police force. If they can not stop young people smoking marijuana, what makes the authorities think they would have any more success banning alcohol ?

There is a strange lure to many people when anything is banned. Price is not a deterrent because if something is out of reach then illegal means - and that often means stealing - becomes the answer to it's provision.

Both of the suggested options would bring smiles to the faces of the church people and those who profess to be so called " experts ", but in reality we already have existing laws that are being widely ignored.

Drinking alcohol to excess seems to be a right of passage to adulthood for young people. It has always been so in the past - and there is little chance that it will change in the future - whatever unenforceable laws pass through the parliament.

There will be casualties and alcohol will ruin some lives, but that is simply the world we live in - and most people out live their wild years and go on to become respectable citizens.

Attempts to change nature are invariably a failure !