1026 - The Freedom to Drink Act

[Leinad]

Someone proving they don't understand what "Speaker" means.

[Leinad]

Someone proving they don't understand what "Speaker" means.

Um, Mr. President, I am technically also the House sponsor for this bill.

Ah, I see, sorry for that.

However, this:

sitting in some sleazy dive getting sloshed out of their minds, turning into alcoholics, working at minimum wage jobs for the rest of their lives, falling into a gutter someplace, freezing to death or dying of alcohol poisoning.

remains absurd. Drinking alcohol =/= becoming an alcoholic.

You guys realize that underage drinking exists already, correct? The government isn't a magic wand that allows you to keep bad things from happening.

Proposed amendment:

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I don't believe section 3 is really necessary. You can't really subtract from federal laws, only add to them. Regions may still have higher minimum drinking ages, but they can't really have anything lower than 18.

That's not the original idea of the bill, though. It was supposed to set an upper and lower limit, and section 2 was added as a fallback in case the regions didn't set the law themselves--of course it could've been worded better.

Lastly, make sure the final text says "minimum age" and you don't accidently set the minimum wage to $18

[Leinad]

Er...Mr. Speaker, you told me you guys rejected this.

Anyway, I think we should set it up where regions can slide it anywhere from 16/17 to 21, with 18 as the baseline if the regions fail to make a law about it themselves.

[Leinad]

16 and 17?  Allowing minors to drink alcohol is an extremely scary notion. I prefer 21 to be the age, as it has been since the 1984 bill did with the highway standards. But this needs to be a regional thing, and I support allowing the regions to choose between 18 and 21, with 21 being the standard. 

You make it sound as if I'm suggesting a complimentary bar in every elementary school.

Consider this, House: we already let people in their upper teens drive machines that regularly go 20 times as fast as nature intended people to move at over 10 times the weight and cause over 30,000 deaths a year nationally. And they already drink a lot: 11% of all national alcohol consumption is underage. These laws don't do much to keep people from drinking, yet do a hell of a lot to make people paranoid of getting arrested, as Siren said.

[Leinad]

I don't think it did, and if it did then someone f'd up by not updating this thread.