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Save The Pub, Save The Teen: Why It's Time To Lower The Drinking Age To 16

Save The Pub, Save The Teen: Why It's Time To Lower The Drinking Age To 16

Lowering the drinking age will encourage responsible drinking.

James Dawson

James Dawson

For a lot of Brits, the 2007 smoking ban led to the decline of the pub as a centre of British life. It signaled the end of the pint-and-a-tab after work drinker, and ushered in a society where you're more likely to have a gym membership than a low-key alcohol dependency.

Of course, pubs have also struggled thanks to the toughening up of licensing laws and high levels of taxation. Pubs are now closing at a rate of 29 a week. Where many a landlord used to turn a blind eye to the placid pisshead, or the youthful drinker with no ID and a broken voice, they'll now turn them away.

A generation of bar staff, scared shitless of £1,000 fines, are now wont to challenge the age of anyone buying booze. The time when a 15-year-old could get a pint so long as their balls had dropped and they kept their mouth shut is at a tragic end. Being a teenager who wants to get pissed in Britain today means stashing your parents' liquor, drinking in parks, or getting mortal at house parties.

Much like sex, drugs and smoking, if teenagers want to do it, they will. So surely it's better to regulate it and make sure it's done safely than to ban it altogether? Without regulation, you drive it underground, leading to irresponsible decisions without supervision. That's why it's time we lowered the drinking age to 16.

It's not just a flight of fancy. I've got history on my side. Back in 1984, a number of states in America raised the drinking age from 18 to 21. Not only did this instantly transform millions of of-age boozers into underage wasters, it resulted in a dramatic rise in young people binge drinking. When it's illegal, you're prone to cram it in quickly and at high volumes.

So how would lowering the drinking age help the great British boozer? For a start, it would reestablish its position as a cornerstone of becoming an adult. The pub's place within British culture is important not just as a locale to buy alcohol - you can do that in clubs, corner shops, supermarkets, wherever - but in its role as an environment to learn the etiquette around intoxication.

Pubs used to teach us not just how to drink, but how to behave when we're drinking. Now that young people don't have that guiding hand, they just drink like unstable alcohol mercenaries.

Credit: Garrett Crook

When I talk so fondly of pubs of yore, it's not because I'm in the midst of an Arcadian UKIP dream, where a lad would have his first pint of bitter in front of an open fire before settling into an insipid adulthood, I'm talking about them as truly social institutions.

While the prices are higher and the door policies stricter, modern pubs can still introduce people to delicate degrees of drunken decorum: They still require you to behave within certain social constraints, and not to piss off the landlord or the regulars. Knowing you will have to see the same faces again means you know not to cross certain lines.

Put simply, if you behave like a drunken arsehole you're likely to be either barred or knocked-out. You learn to control the way you behave as you drink because, ultimately, you want to be able to continue to drink there.

Clubs, for everything they bring to the table, don't have that sense of community - nobody has to queue for 30 minutes outside a pub, nobody has a Sunday-sesh in a club - so there's no need to behave other than to keep the bouncers off your back.

We have to ask ourselves why, in spite of government policies to tackle binge drinking, A&Es across the country are full of lads who have drunk themselves to oblivion on Saturdays, with rates of admission for alcohol poisoning doubling in 6 years.

The truth is that, as always, top-down authoritarian government policies aimed at saving us from ourselves and not drinking 'till we're old enough' have simply pushed under 18s away from drinking establishments that have unwritten guidelines on how to act in order to get served.

Instead, they're drinking without guidelines, mired by the inherent risk of being underage which, as a consequence, causes them to drink fast and behave like arseholes.

Reducing the drinking age in bars and pubs would mean these people have an extra two years to learn how to drink in a public setting. Moreover, this younger generation would associate said public setting with sensible alcohol consumption, which would have a positive, long-term effect on the pub industry. Pubs would no longer be viewed as an unusual oddity, where one can only drink on the off-chance of a lenient barman. People would behave better, and the cost of a pint wouldn't be such a factor as folks would be less inclined to get wrecked.

The smoking-ban has had its part in destroying the British pub, but declining numbers of young adults in pubs could be what ends it.

If we want to save the pub and encourage more social drinking, then we need to lower the drinking age.

Words by James Dawson

Featured image: Garrett Crook

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Topics: Pubs