It also makes complete and total sense that you can sell your body by joining the Marines as an 0311 MOS rifleman/grunt on your 18th birthday, but you're going straight to hell if you have an alcoholic drink before you're 21. I don't know if I've ever met a European who doesn't think the US's alcohol age laws are weird.
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I have a cousin who lives in Illinois and joined the Marines. He's 20 now. He can shoot fully automatic weapons in the military and has won awards for handgun precision and skill.
But he can't buy a handgun in his home state or drink a beer.
Make it make sense.
Joining the military helps the government achieve its goals. Having a gun at home doesn't, and drinking doesn't. You scratch the government's back, and it'll scratch yours.
It’s my understanding, for the most part, that they do not have constant access to fire arms, that they are somewhat tightly controlled on base precisely because the army has learn widespread indiscriminate access is a safety problem despite all this training.
The army "learned" no such thing. There was never a safety problem with guns on military bases. Guns were banned by Bill Clinton as part of a broader gun control push by the Democrats.
The effect has been the opposite of increased safety. We've had a couple of unopposed mass murder incidents on US military bases since the ban went into effect, most notably by Nidal Hasan, who was able to kill 13 and wound 33 because nobody else had a weapon.
For a few years after states raised the drinking age to 21, you could still drink at 18 on a military base. Even today base commanders still have the ability to lower the age to 18 if there's a nearby international border over which personnel can drink at that age.
Yes, US alcohol laws are stupid. Modern temperance activists were able to greatly restrict legal access to booze using anti-drunk driving "for the children" rhetoric.
Honestly I think the legal age for drinking could be lower if only society treated it better. A lot of drinkers are not only reckless but brought up to be reckless by how society treats them, what society expects of them, peer pressure, etc.
Similarly to how I'm salty about having to obtain LSD from black markets instead of having a known safe supply from a pharmacy. I trust my vendor, but the skill to not only find the market but to find the vendor and actually execute the ordering process is not easy to come by.
A lot more things could be available if people were properly informed and not just fed propaganda about how they're waay too dangerous. It's completely possible to be responsible about substances, it's called harm reduction. Also prescriptions are a thing -- even if I had to get a prescription from my doctor, I would even be fine with that as long as I'd get to take it at home.
I've always been curious what means and criteria one can use to vet a synthetic drug.
Do you mean well-known drugs or new drugs? Tests have been developed for well-known drugs, and at big parties there are often harm-reduction charities offering free or cheap drug testing.
I mean established ones. I'm aware of the narcotic safety tests, but have no idea how one might check the quality of a psychedelic like LSD before taking it.
Reagent tests are the standard for that. They're basically a bunch of acids that change colors depending on what they're mixed with. You test some samples with a bunch of them, and the way each one changes colors tells you what is or isn't in the samples. Ehrlich reagent is good for checking for the presence of LSD, others are good for ruling out adulterants. Fent strips for example are used to check for presence of fentanyl. You can get all of the above from places like DanceSafe.