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She runs “bartending school” for incoming students during mandatory orientation sessions at Georgia. Handing over a vodka bottle full of water, she asks them to pour what they think is one drink into a 16-ounce cup. After a discussion of alcohol’s physical effects and consequences, she empties the cups into two-ounce shot glasses. What seemed like one drink is often two or three.

In normal countries, teenagers start drinking in a supervised environment (read: Mom and Dad, who won't appreciate that Sonny threw up in his shoe again because he came home way too sozzled to find the toilet bowl), and they start on beer and wine, which makes it much more difficult to overdose. In America the infantilized teenagers go off to college and then proceed to black out on spirits, because spirits are easier to smuggle into the dorm. What could possibly go wrong there?

Also: the American problem of trying to get on top of alcohol abuse by limiting availability, when you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility. Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much.

> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much.

Research suggests that you might be wrong.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/twitter-politics-drunken-...

> Key quote: “Harsher sanctions to drinking and driving may generate no marginal deterrent effect if drivers’ perceived risks of receiving the punishments are low. Therefore, rather than escalating sanction severity, increasing the probability of detection and/or enforcement may be more effective in reducing drinking and driving.”

This is a good observation, and reminds me of an article I read a while back about why the parole system works so poorly (it was a great article, sorry that I don't have the link).

The theory was that much or our criminal law system makes an assumption of a rational actor. A 1% chance of severe penalty would deter a crime where they payoff is minor (i.e.., the small chance of a severely punished DUI would convince a rational actor to call a cab).

But it doesn't appear to work that way. The article suggested that the best way to deter certain types of repeated criminal behavior are consequences that are swift, certain, and measured (in severity). Instead, what we have is slow, random, and severe. Supposedly, that does little to deter crime, but does a great filling up prisons and creating people who have a lifelong criminal history for job applications.

Your description of people's reaction to the risk and severity of punishment sounds entirely rational.
A rational actor would be twice as deterred if you kept the risk of punishment the same and doubled the severity.

But actual people don't respond that way. They respond to the risk rather than the expected punishment.

The problem with this is everyone's definition of Rational Actor is arbitrary in what incentives it excludes or includes. Talking about what a Rational Actor would do makes about as much sense as claiming your opinion is fully objective.
You'd probably need to define and use "marginal severity," which unfortunately probably ends up being subjective and difficult to analyze.
This is a purely anecdotal response but I live in Texas now and come from Canada where the punishments for drunk driving are very severe. In short I am absolutely floored by the casual nature of drunk driving here, across all segments of society compared to Canada.

In Canada my very alternative friends to whom casual law breaking like illegal drinking and drugs would be nothing, would almost universally never consider drinking and driving.

In the US those same type of friends seeming drink and drive 5-6 days a week, often after consuming amounts of alcohol I consider ridiculous. Additionally I regularly interact with professionals and even professors who drink and drive.

This is purely my opinion, but the difference I experience here is outa control when it comes to drinking and driving and I do think the harsh punishments have something to do with it.

I don't think you can reliably compare things on one variable like this. A counter-comparison that reaches an opposite conclusion: Here in Denmark the sentences for drunk driving are considerably lower than in the US, rarely involving prison time. And yet drunk driving is less common. Typically the punishment is suspension of license and a fine, with the duration of suspension, and the amount of fine, increasing with higher BAC and with repeated offenses. The focus is on removing people from the roads (by suspending their license, possibly for multi-year periods), but not imprisoning them. In extreme cases (BAC >0.2%, repeated offenses, etc.), prison sentences of 20–40 days may be imposed, but rarely more.

Details [Google Translate]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Canada and the United States, while similar, are not culturally the same.

Children in the States, because they are already breaking the law by drinking, routinely get behind the wheel without thinking about it. They get home safely and learn that it's ok to drink and drive.

In the US, we have a combination of a binge drinking culture, a driving culture and a fierce independence from authority. The combination isn't the best for deterring drinking and driving.

Here's a simple reason laws don't work as well as you'd think: when you drink and drive, you're not in your right mind. You're less inhibited than you would be otherwise and often you think you're fine to drive. Without sober or semi-sober friends around, there's nothing stopping you from doing just that.

You can do your part by reporting each incident that you can. Call 911 and give them the make and model, license plate number, starting location, and likely direction of travel for each drunk driver that you can.
Texas is not realy the USA, they don't like much law and taxes. Most states come down hard on drinking and driving.
Texas is not realy the USA...

An attractive sentiment in general, but it's not true. Texas is just like every other state, in that they spend way too much on the "enforcement" of drunk-driving laws. The reason is obvious: local police and sheriffs get the same ridiculous federal grants that LEOs in all other states get.

EDIT: Congratulations to Louisiana, I expect they laugh at Texas' patchwork of dry and "partially-moist" counties.

In my experience people are similar to the parent in both California and Massachusetts.
I think it depends on which law you are talking about. Airport immigration authorities in texas are a lot worse than SF i've found.
Harsh sentances for murderers also very likely do not prevent murder. But they do keep known murderers in places where the exposure to potential victims is much lower. By doing so, we have a safer world even if we do not have a significant disincentive to commit murder.
And now you know why the US houses most of the world's prisoners [0]. This is the same thinking that brings the US security theater at its airports. Anything for safety, even if it only mariginally works.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/safe-communities-fair-sentences/prison-...

We aren't the worlds largest jailor because we put murderers in jail. We are because we have made jailable crimes out of benign actions that do not harm other people. Drunk driving is not a benign action that does not hurt other people.
Who's talking about prison? Driving is a privilege. Suspending it, possibly forever, doesn't appraoch custodial sentences.
If the laws are on the books and applied in a non-arbitrary way the perception of DUI might change - after all you want people to be sober behind the wheel even when the police aren't looking. Unfortunately, in the US, you can't breathalyze everyone on a Saturday night, you have to have "reasonable suspicion". Which means that on weekends, the roads are less safe than they could be, I avoid driving on the weekend after dark.
Sobriety checkpoints without reasonable suspicion were ruled by the Supreme Court to not violate the 4th amendment, and only ten states have prohibited such checkpoints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint#Legality_in_t...

Compare to the UK - you can buy alcohol at 18; you can have alcohol on licenced premises with a meal if you're with parents and 16 or over.

https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/check-the-facts/alcohol-and-the...

We have a pretty severe problem with alcohol here.

One in five ambulances in London a the weekends are for alcohol related injuries; hospitals in major cities have drunk tanks; cirrhosis is affecting more people and younger people -- and these problems are not in the population of people with alcoholism but in the people who just drink too much.

So it'd be interesting to work out how other countries manage it.

Yeah, it's always interesting comparing drinking laws. In the UK we've tried to crackdown on underage drinking quite a bit in the past decade or two. But it hasn't really worked particularly well. Part of it is that in their crackdown on drinking, they've massively increased the taxes on alcohol (as if price will stop people partying!). These have really squeezed the little country pubs so much that roughly 30 pubs are closing down every week now. You may think that this is a good thing on the surface, but all it does is drive people (and kids) from the small safe pubs in the villages, to the big venues and clubs in the towns and cities; which are open far later and push far stronger alcohol to maximise sales. And it's the concentration of people in the major drinking towns that leads to a lot of the disorderly behaviour, violence and accidents requiring A&E.

Whereas 20-30 years ago, small village pubs were a mainstay of drinking culture. Turning a blind eye to the occasional kid drinking a pint or two was a heck of a lot safer than pushing them into the cities with fake IDs. Or buying litres of spirits and downing them on a park bench. But pubs can't afford to take any risk nowadays, for each 17 year old you accidentally let into the pub, it's a £10k fine for the manager, £5k fine for the barman who serves the kid. Plus a possible revocation of license.

Then there's the social downsides of being too strict on drinking for the rest of us. The "Think 25?" campaign is particularly terrible, it catches even people like me at age 30. I can understand that maybe I look under 25, but do I really look 17 years or less - that's what the law says they have to legally look out for after all. That is my legal right. It's insulting and an infringement on basic liberties that we should be able to take for granted. I envisage having to carry ID on me for a good 5-10 years more, unless I grow a beard...

A minor can have alcohol with a parent in the state of Missouri as well. In fact, it's not technically illegal there for a minor to consume alcohol. It's only illegal to purchase or possess, but they consider a BAC over 0.02% as possession.
In normal countries, the underage drinking also isn't criminalized. It is illegal to sell alcohol to underage persons, but it's not illegal for said underage person to drink it.

That said, I'd love for drunk driving to have harsher penalties. Not jail, but simply driving ban for at least a year with an extended retest (psych eval, as they do in other countries if you lose your license to drunk driving).

DUI is already at least probation + a significant suspension in most states, at least that's my perception. At best, if there was no accident/injury, you get a provisional driving license that will let you go to/from work, and you'll lose that on a 2nd offense. Plus your insurance will go sky-high. It's really not the slap on the wrist it used to be.

Simple public intoxication or illegal consumption is, in most cases, something you can have expunged if it's a first offense and you pay the bribe^H^H^H^H^H pre-trial diversion fee.

> "you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility"

True, but most American cultural pathologies are rooted in mistrust of others, a mistrust which is itself often rooted in one or more fears that derive from ignorance. When you are ignorant and fearful of a problem or a group of people, it's much easier to appeal to your government to do something about it rather than actually try to understand that problem or people. Trusting those people to be responsible is the last thing that occurs to you in such a state of mind.

All I'm trying to say is that this is a specific instance of a much larger trend which has been in place for a long time. I don't know how to fix it.

Your comment is itself generalizing and demonstrating ignorance about a very large and diverse group of people.
Blaming the drinking culture itself - that American kids aren't allowed to drink, and when they do, they don't know how - is a common sentiment. It has an easy narrative, and I think it may be true. But I've never seen anyone attempt to actually verify it.

I can construct equally sensible narratives that have nothing to do with the drinking culture. I can also imagine it's not the drinking culture, but the fact that most American kids go away to college. In some other cultures which have more sensible attitudes towards alcohol (and I do think they are more sensible), I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college.

> I think they also tend to stay close to their parents for college

Which may also be influenced by the probability of 800 miles away being another country (with an entirely different language).

It would take something short of a drunk driving massacre to get the momentum needed to harshly punish drunk driving.

Like many laws in America a lot of it emotion driven - a lower drinking age would most likely help the college binge drinking problem, but advocating for such a law means someone is going to call you out on trying to turn the children of America into alcoholics.

Likewise, no one wants to be on the other end of the outrage when celebrity/athlete/politician gets 10 years for having a "couple beers" after work (doesn't everyone have a couple beers? thats too harsh! /s).

Everyone says this, and I wonder if there's any data backing it up. Is there correlation, for instance, between having your first drink after high school and binge drinking? I know everyone likes to say that Americans don't drink until they're in college, but even that certainly doesn't reflect my experience and the general sense I get from talking to other Americans.
> Why not hand out serious prison time for first-time drunk drivers? It would increase road safety so much.

I don't think stricter DUI laws will work, they rely on the absurd idea that a drunk will somehow have enough self-awareness to make a rational decision (not to drive).

Overdrinking is a problem that I only think is going to get worse until there's some serious changes made to how drinking is treated legally.

When I was in college, I was a part of my fraternity's "risk management" team, a group of brothers whose only job is to stay sober during parties, find people who had drunk too much or more commonly people who had completely blacked out and hush them off away from the alcohol or to a safe part of the house where they could be watched for signs of alcohol poisoning and kept safe from being taken advantage of.

If there's any one trend I've noticed while I worked risk management at those parties, it was that the more taboo it is to drink alcohol, the more that people binge drink it. It's always the students whose parents were the most uptight about drinking or those who couldn't purchase alcohol yet who were the biggest binge drinkers and most common to pass out. There was one period during which there was a university crackdown on drinking at fraternity parties, and the most noticeable thing during the crackdown was that people would drink a -lot- more.

The amazing part about it was when people turned 21, it was like they became seasoned drinkers over night. People who had problems pacing themselves during every party would instantly turn into a moderate drinker once their 21st had passed.

I think it would be very interesting to see some studies done on the taboo of drinking and whether it changes people's likelihood to overdrink, because it seemed with every crackdown measure the local police force took against drinking at parties, the problem only got worse.

The solution to this is to start drinking beers with your kids at age 10. This way drinking will be the most uncool thing ever, and they'll grow up to be teetotalers.

Seriously though, we need a culture change. You can't tell them they can never drink, then turn them loose in another city by themselves and expect it to not be taken to extremes. That's pretty dumb.

This is actually allowed in some states. There's doesn't seem to be any particular pattern to which states allow it and which don't, eg stereotypically liberal California has the same ultra-strict requirements as stereotypically conservative Kentucky. Here's a neat summary of the different exceptions to the 21-year minimum age rule, broken out by state.

http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

3. for religious purposes in 26 states

Haha, I guess all the Catholic churches in the other 24 states will get raided next time they have a First Communion. This is just one example of how unreliable these sorts of comparisons are.

Not necessarily. When I was growing up in Catholic Ireland we used to eat the communion wafer but only the priest drank the wine - more because it would have been impractical to serve to hundreds of people than any other reason, but also partly from hygiene considerations. I asked our priest about it once (I was an alter boy) and his response was that it was just too much hassle and they were glad to abandon the practice. Back then churches used to be packed 4 times a day on Sundays so I can see how it would be a headache. I used to get hand cramps from holding the little metal plate under people's chins to prevent the communion wafer falling on the floor.
Between the Council of Trent and about 1970, the Roman Catholic laity took communion in one kind only, and the chalice was reserved to the priests.
Interesting! They kept that up for a long time afterwards in Ireland, at least to the late 1980s (which was when I stopped going to church). I've occasionally been to a Catholic church in the US (weddings, funerals although I'm an atheist now) and it was quite disorienting to be offered the wine at Communion.
Hi, Germany here, it worked on me.

Parents gave me beer when i was a kid around 10, shit tasted awful and bitter.

Didn't start drinking again until i discovered british ciders and belgian beers at the age of ~28, but that's still a "once a quarter" thing.

"Even going to the tape, though, is not always enough. The mother of the guy in the Santa suit maintained that the police should’ve taken her son, who eventually passed out, back to his room, not to jail. Recounting the story, Mr. Williamson looks momentarily exasperated. He tried to explain, he says, that her son was safer sleeping off his drunkenness under supervision."

It seems the LEOs cannot win when dealing with a mother who 'knows best'

I'd chalk it up to the squeaky wheel problem.

There are a huge number of situations where there are two sets of rules or prices or options, one for most people and one for people who complain once. If you're a sucker, you pay retail. If you make the slightest effort to haggle, you can save money. You can bargain your traffic tickets down to non-moving violations for fewer points off your license and a smaller fine. If you complain at a hotel you might get a free spa pass. If you have overdue library books, you can sometimes sweet talk the librarian into waiving your fine. If you ask for a raise, you might get it.

There are a huge number of situations where -- by making the slightest protest -- you can sometimes save a bit of time or money or get something for nothing, and moreover there is usually no penalty for trying. I don't think this mother was doing anything different: she may not think her child is a special flower, but she has learned through much experience in life that it never hurts to ask for special treatment, because you sometimes get it.

Well, considering he's one of the three people arrested per weekend out of "thousands"... it's arbitrary and ineffective.
Three people arrested for doing things considered over the top (e.g. passed out on a park bench, breaking in to a dorm of the opposite sex) out of thousands of drinkers -- who they do not enforce drinking laws on.
I went to UGA my freshman year. Compared to other campuses where the parties are at fraternities or private residences, Athens is a bar (and, as the article points out, a fake ID) town.

It was very much a wink-and-grin environment: the "bad photocopy job pasted onto a McDonald's gift card" description is very apt. Some bars were tougher than others, but for a guy, showing up with a favorable distribution of girls would cause the bouncer to look the other way.

It's obvious and egregious (UGA suspends open container laws on gamedays), but as the article's subjects and other HN posters point out, the problem is not bars and fake IDs, and more college students' drinking problems. (Which exist at fraternities, house parties, and other venues as well.) To that end, I laud the focus on safety, education, and one-strikes over just pushing the "scene" underground.

(Re open container suspension) A few years ago I paid a $280 fine for walking an open beer across the street in Athens. To this article's point I think the cops pick and choose as to where they may be most effective at a given point in the day, the beer didn't have a label on it (I brewed it) and the cop may have thought it looked odd.

Although the town has stayed the same since my years in Athens, I do think there is an uptick in underage drinking in general, or at the least a larger movement to drinking harder spirits. Personally, I think there is a larger mention of liquor by name in today's music than there has been in the past and that plays a part.

Until the beginning of the 1980s, 18-year-olds could drink at least beer in most states. In New York they could drink hard liquor, in Colorado 3.2 beer, for example. Then the Reagan Administration decided that stopping under-21 drinking would reduce traffic deaths as much as mandatory airbags. States that did not raise the drinking age would lose highway funds. By the mid-1980s, the drinking age was 21 pretty much everywhere.