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August 09, 2005
MADD: dumb as a drunk
The Washington Post has a good op-ed on parents who throw parties for their kids and supply alcohol for the occasion. It is particularly embarassing to the neo-Prohibitionists at MADD who advocate that the way to stop drunken driving is to criminialize underage drinking such that it occurs not in controlled settings but rather in "cars, in parking lots, in vacant lots and in rented motel rooms."
As I pointed out in a 2000 op-ed, a sensible policy to combat the ill effects of underage drinking needs to acknowledge that underage people will drink. I was definitely not a heavy drinker, but I drank in 5 states and four foreign countries before I turned 21. As long as enforcement policies push teenagers to drink in unregulated, unsupervised environments, we will continue to have a "problem" with underage drinking.
The Post tells an illustrates how ridiculous the law enforcement position is:
The Post reported a while back on a party in Bethesda in which there was no underage drinking at all. Police approached the parents at a backyard graduation party and asked if they could administer breath tests to underage guests. The mother refused. So the cops cordoned off the block and administered breath tests to each kid as he or she left the party. Not a single underage guest had been drinking. The police then began writing traffic tickets for all of the cars around the house hosting the party. The mother told The Post, "It almost seemed like they were angry that they didn't find anything."Surely there are more pressing concerns for the Washington area criminal justice system to address than parents who throw supervised parties for high school kids. These parents are at least involved enough in their kids' lives to know that underage drinking goes on and to take steps to prevent that reality from becoming harmful. We ought to be encouraging that kind of thing, not arresting people for it.
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Posted by adrianjo at August 9, 2005 01:50 PM
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