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654-677 in: Bonnie,
DRINKING AND
COMING OF AGE IN A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs
S-106 91
robin.room@sorad.su.se
GENERAL SOCIAL PROCESSES IN
COMING OF AGE
Coming of age as a process
Over the last two
centuries, societies influenced by the 18th-century Enlightenment have constructed an ideal of childhood as a
protected and liminal stage of life (Aries, 1962; Kett, 1977). Children became
exempted and excluded from participation in the labor marketplace by
child-labor laws, and the innocence ascribed to them was protected by such
means as film classifications and sexual abuse laws. Different age-grades of
childhood and adolescence became largely segregated from other age-grades and
from the adult world by separate schools at different levels. The child eventually became the woman or man,
but the process of becoming a woman or man was conceived of not in terms of a
specific rite of passage at a particular time but in terms of a process with
many stages.
During the course of
this long process, the child and adolescent is defined to some extent as an
acolyte to his or her future as an adult.
Children are to some extent protected, through such arrangements as
juvenile courts and sealed records, from such potential blights on their adult
life as a criminal record. But parents,
teachers, and other adult guardians define the central task of the child and
particularly of the teenager as preparing through education and otherwise to
take a full place in adult life, and are concerned about anything that might
impede this preparation, and about behaviours which potentially stain future
status or injure future functioning in adult life. In this cultural context,
there is particular concern about behaviours and experiences which are morally
suspect but legally tolerated in adults. In fact, laws on the protection of children
are often the signal of a residual cultural disapproval of behaviors which were
at some time in the past not only immoral but illegal for everyone.
Beyond this, there is
also a generalized concern about joining the adult world "too early":
holding a fulltime job is not morally suspect and does not necessarily injure a
child's future status, but our cultural and legal system forbids this below a
given age. Where exceptions must be
made, as for child actors, the
The proliferation of
legal restrictions on behavior by chronological age is a relatively modern
phenomenon. Minimum-age limits for
drinking, for instance, mostly date back only to the post-Repeal era (Mosher,
1980). Differentiations of status in
terms of life-stages have a much longer and wider history. But the modern legal restrictions both
express and encourage a cultural tendency to think of these status
differentiations in a particular way: in terms of chronological age. In a strongly universalistic cultural and
legal frame, a fixed chronological age applying to everyone is a legal definition
of adulthood more comfortable and more easily defended than any criterion based
on an individualized assessment of maturity or on a civil status (e.g.,
marriage) would be. Of course, a yet
more universalistic standard for behaviours seen as inappropriate for children
is to forbid them for everyone. Minimum
age restrictions cannot exist, of course, for behaviours like marijuana use
which are illegal also for adults.
Emancipation and settling
down: the “social clock”
Part of growing up is to try out and to take on new
behaviors. While the process is often
fraught with anxiety for the person growing up, it is often even more
anxiety-producing for parents and other adults in the vicinity. The anxiety or disapproval may be about
trying out the behavior at all. But
often it is also about the age at which the behavior is taken on. Behavior which is seen as too “grown up” for
one age may be accepted without too much fuss if it occurs at a later age.
In the context of discussions of social problems and
youth, the focus tends to be on behaviors that are taken on “too young”. But in a wider frame, there is also growing
unease if a young person does not try out and take on a behavior at what is
felt to be an appropriate age. It may be
seen as equally inappropriate to fail to have a full-time job by the age of 25
as it would be to hold a full-time job at age 12. Sociologists talk of these normative
standards for when a behavior or status should be taken on as the “social
clock” (Neugarten et al., 1965). The
normative standards for the social clock for any given behavior or status are
likely to vary in time and by cultural group.
We can think of the period of adolescence and young
adulthood in terms of two complementary processes: emancipation and settling
down. The content of emancipation includes
the various behaviors for which there are minimum age-limits, as well as such
aspects as staying out late at night and moving out of the parental home. By "settling down" we mean the
culturally normative process of taking on an accumulation of continuing
obligations: a car loan, a "real" (non-temporary) job, a marriage, a
child, a house mortgage, and so on.
Along with the general legal provisions we have
mentioned, the emancipation process is governed by strong general cultural
expectations. By its nature, it almost
always sooner or later also involves a generational tug-of-war within the
family. The general cultural
expectations about the settling down process are also quite strong, but legal
age limits and the tug-of-war within the family are usually much less involved
in the process. In the individual
life-history, emancipation and settling down may be closely linked, as for
instance if a daughter does not leave the parents’ home until she marries. But characteristic of modernity is a
considerable temporal separation of the two processes, leaving a considerable
liminal space in adolescence and early adulthood. Contrary to common belief, this transitional
status and period has also been common in other societies and times (e.g.,
Sarmela, 1969).
Emancipation and contested
behaviors
As the existence of the minimum-age laws suggests, the
process of emancipation involves many behaviours we may describe as
"contested" (Gusfield, 1996).
Some of these behaviours -- driving a car, getting a job, having sex --
are expected by nearly everyone to happen eventually as part of adult life, but
to engage in them too early is seen as upsetting or even shocking. Others are legal but grudgingly tolerated for
adults, and there is at least hope the process of emancipation will not include
them. Thus most parents nowadays hope
that their children will never take up cigarette smoking. Other behaviors are illegal for everyone but
common in the emancipation process: marijuana smoking, for instance, as well as
behaviours with victims such as vandalism and violence.
The contest is generational, between teenagers and young
adults on the one hand and adults in general and school and civic authorities
on the other. It is also intensely
personal, within the family: parents find themselves on the front line, locked
into a role as guardians of conventional hopes and expectations against the
claims for autonomy and emancipation of their offspring. For many parents, the process of emancipation
feels like a long process of grudging retreat from their preferred standards of
conduct. As Robin Williams (1960) has
discussed, a last fallback expedient in upholding a norm is a "patterned
evasion", that is, ignoring evidence of its violation. The parent scoots past the couch with eyes
averted, rather than face up to the reality of the entangled limbs there. It
might be noted that there is also considerable patterned evasion of norms at a
societal level: almost all who will eventually drink alcoholic beverages in the
In terms of the general “social clock” concerning ages at
which potentially contested behaviors are found acceptable by a majority of
adults in North America, mean ages probably range from about 17½ to 20, judging
by data from
Table 2 compares the responses of
The alcohol normative ages given by
Tracks and subcultures: sorting and differentiation in adolescence
Along with their functions
of preparing every child for adulthood and holding different age-grades apart
from each other and from the adult world, schools and other institutions for
teenagers also function as major sorting devices in the course of sociocultural
reproduction. By the early teenage
years, the curriculum diverges for different students, and often students are
divided into different streams which are recognized by all as having different
fates in store as adults. Reactions to
errors in marking state examinations illustrate what is seen as being at stake:
students may have their “chances in life unfairly damaged” (Bright and
Hinsliff, 2002). While the sorting in
the
Before they are
teenagers, children have also begun to sort themselves out into differentiated
crowds and cliques. A 9-year-old child
in the
Children and youth also
construct their own subcultures, which often have substantial continuity across
cohorts of children, as the Opies (2001) found for the playground songs and
games of young schoolchildren. In
adolescence there is not only a general youth subculture but also a variety of
more specific subcultural formations, built around sports, cars and other
machines, music, arts, etc. While there
is often adult input into these subcultures, attempts to subject the activities
to rigorous control are often resisted and evaded. Around the edge of the official
adult-controlled version of events there tends to be a lively social world run
by the teenagers themselves. In the 20th
century, styles of music and dancing have been particularly productive of
subcultural differentiations not only between generations but also among youth
themselves (Polhemus, 1995; Thornton, 1995).
Increasingly, these subcultures have become internationalized, as with
the spread of raves.
Cultural variations in the processes
It has long been clear that, on a global
basis, there are large cultural variations in the processes we have been
outlining. The processes have some of
the same content as the “rites of passage” analyzed by van Gennep (1960) in
tribal societies. But such rites of
passage as classically described take place typically in a well-defined and
limited period, while the processes we are considering occur over a much longer
time and often with less clear temporal definition. While, as has been remarked, “some have
viewed the entire period of adolescence in modern cultures as analogous to the
disorienting middle stage of van Gennep’s classic three-part scheme” of a rite
of passage, that is, as “an extended period of transition characterized by
uncertainty and confusion that eventually leads to the adult taking his or her
place in society” (Anonymous, 1997), it seems clear that there are variations
both between and within modern cultures in the extent to which any such analogy
would make sense.
Cultural variations in
expectations about the “social clock” often come into view in stark relief in
particular circumstances in multicultural societies. For immigrants to the Nordic countries from
Within the general
frame of developed societies with European roots, the range of cultural
variations in the processes tends to be more limited. The remaining differences, however, still
have the capacity to shock. American
teenagers are likely to be surprised to discover, for instance, that the minimum
age for a driving license is 18 in much of Europe, while Europeans tend to be
shocked by the relatively low ages at which a teenager can be tried as an adult
in the U.S., and put at risk of a range of penalties up to and including the
death penalty.
In some matters, the
On the other hand, with
respect to minimum drinking age, the
Table 3 makes it clear
that
CULTURAL VARIATION IN MEANINGS OF DRINKING AND DRUNKENNESS
Differences at the general cultural level
As physical
commodities, alcoholic beverages have a range of use-values (Mäkelä, 1983),
reflecting their different properties.
As liquids taken into the body, they quench thirst. Cold, they can cool the body; hot, they can
warm it. As a source of calories, they
provide some sustenance. Traditionally,
they were used medicinally; with the findings on their protective value for
heart disease, this use is returning, although the net health balance from
drinking in the population as a whole is negative. As psychoactive substances,
they can act as a mood-changer; at heavier doses, they can take one out of
oneself, or be a means of psychic escape.
While these use-values
can be distinguished from one another, when an alcoholic beverage is used for
one purpose, its other properties are also carried along. To use wine as a food and source of calories,
as was done traditionally, for instance, by Italian farm laborers, does not
preclude it having psychoactive effects as well.
On top of the physical
properties of alcohol, and the use-values attached to them, is an extraordinarily
wide range of cultural meanings ascribed to the drinking, with their own range
of use-values. For a majority of
Christians, for instance, wine is a sacrament, bringing with it a range of
sacred associations. Sacramental wine is
not supposed to intoxicate. Old Anglican
prayerbooks, for instance, therefore felt it necessary to deal with the issue
of how consecrated wine left over after communion should be used. It could not be returned to profane status,
but neither was it proper for the priest simply to drink it up, risking
drunkenness. Instead, the instruction
was that he was to gather other communicants and that he and they should
“reverently” drink it on the spot (Church of England, 1662).
A crucial use of
alcohol, from the perspective of the harms associated with it, is the set of
use-values surrounding intoxication from drinking. The “prized but dangerous” psychoactive
effects of drinking heavily, as Steele and Josephs (1990) term them, are
differentially sought by drinkers in different cultures. As the ethnographic literature has long
taught us (MacAndrew and Edgerton, 1969; Room, 2001), there are also big
cultural differences in comportment from a given level of drinking -- as it is
often described, differences in the “disinhibition” associated with the
drinking. The combined effects of these
differences in drinking patterns and in cultural norms of drunken comportment
can be quite dramatic: time series analyses of the relation between changes in average
alcohol consumption and changes in homicide rates suggest that an extra unit of
drinking pushes the homicide rate up twice as much in northern European
countries like Norway as in southern countries like Italy (Rossow, 2001).
Recently, a scale of
the degree of hazard in the patterns of drinking in a society has been
developed, ranging as a first approximation from 1 for the least hazardous
patterns to 4 for the most hazardous (Rehm et al., 2001; see Table 4). On this scale,
The scale has so far
been used only at the level of societies as a whole, but the same kind of
dimensions of variation exist also within societies. In particular, there is some evidence that
the social trouble per unit of drinking differs between regions of the
Differences at the level of young people and youth cultures
In societies like the
Ethnographic and news reports
about young people’s drinking in southern
But there is room for
some skepticism about how much has really changed in young people’s drinking
in, say, Italy. The youth drinking
parties described by Beccaria and Guidoni (2002), for instance, around young
men’s conscription in northern
The somewhat puzzling
findings concerning attitudes and norms on drinking among adults in northern
and southern
Quantitative evidence
on the issue of cross-cultural variation in hazardous drinking patterns in
Europe is available from the European Study of Patterns of Alcohol and Drug Use
(ESPAD: Hibell et al., 2000), which administered a common questionnaire
(comparable in a number of items with the U.S. Monitoring the Future Study
questionnaire – Johnston et al., 2000) to 15-year-olds in schools in a total of
30 countries in Europe. Table 4 shows
some results from the 1999 samples of this study, along with results for
10th-graders from the
In terms of the actual
proportion drinking 3 or more times in the last 30 days, the
The last two columns in
the table show responses in the different national samples on getting
drunk. What it means to be drunk is a
matter of cultural definition, and the responses are also affected by idiom and
connotations in the local language, so comparisons should be made with
caution. In four societies -- Finland,
the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland -- a majority of the 15-16-year-olds
report having been drunk in the last month; in the first three of these
societies, along with the students in Moscow, one-third or more of the students
report having been drunk by age 13. At the other end of the spectrum, having
been drunk by age 13 is relatively uncommon in many of the wine cultures and parts
of eastern Europe, and rates of having been drunk in the last 30 days are 20%
or below in four wine cultures -- Croatia, Malta, Portugal and Romania.
The ESPAD study also offers
the broadest set of quantitative data on changes in teenage drinking in
Youth drinking has
become a general social and health concern in Europe – in fact, concerns about
youth drinking have been the main vehicle for expressing concerns about alcohol
problems in general at a Europe-wide level, for instance in the European
Union. A flurry of concern about
“alcopops” (sweetened alcoholic drinks perceived to be aimed at youth) started
in 1995 and brought the first serious attempt at public-health oriented action
on alcohol issues within the European union structure (Sutton and Nylander,
1999). Eventually in early 2001, European Ministers of Health agreed on a
“Declaration on Young People and Alcohol” stating that “the health and
wellbeing of many young people today are being seriously threatened by the use
of alcohol and other psychoactive substances”, and setting out goals including
reducing drinking and high-risk drinking substantially, delaying the onset of
drinking among young people, and reducing pressures on young people to drink
from alcohol advertising and other promotion (WHO, 2001).
Nevertheless, concern
about youth drinking is generally less urgent in Europe than in the
AGE LIMITS AND COMING OF AGE: DISCOURSE AND CHOICES
Arguments and issues in the discourse about underage drinking
An interesting study,
but one which has not been done, would be to read and analyze the discourse in
different societies about the minimum legal age for drinking and for other
behaviors. Clearly, on these matters there is influence between polities: for
instance, the age of majority was lowered from 21 in many places in the 1970s,
while at present there is a strong tendency to push up the minimum age for
purchasing cigarettes.
One potential
consideration in discussions about the minimum legal age for drinking would be
the effect of alcohol on the physically developing body. This, for instance, was a consideration in
the recent proposal by a Canadian Senate committee for a minimum age of 16 for
a legalized marijuana regime (Senate Special Committee..., 2002:I,166). Other potential considerations are the
various ages at which understanding and judgement in different circumstances
are considered mature, and how drinking and intoxication may interplay with
these. For instance, intoxication often
enters into legal considerations about consent to sexual intercourse and about
intent to perform criminal acts; for both of these, there is a minimum age
where a teenager’s self-governance is recognized. If a teenager is too young to be held to
account legally for the results of drinking, maybe he or she is too young to be
drinking.
In the U.S., arguments
defending an age-21 minimum drinking age emphasize the higher probabilities of
later drinking problems for those who start drinking earlier (e.g., National
Advisory Council..., 2002:51), although there is room for questioning the
causal significance and relevance to the minimum drinking age of the
relationships these arguments draw on.
Issues of the relation of the drinking age to other normative ages can
also come into the discussion. For
instance, a consideration in raising the minimum drinking age from 18 to 19 in
An important
consideration with respect to minimum drinking age is the issue of how and in
what circumstances drinking is to be initiated.
A position paper of the National Youth Rights Association (n.d.)
summarizes the main line of argument on this that has been used in the
“Drinking age laws discourage rather than encourage a
transition period between youthful abstinence and adult use of alcoholic beverages,"
writes journalist and sociologist Mike A. Males (1996:207).
Under such laws, many young people
learn drinking in unsafe environments, like basement keg parties. They use
alcohol with the intention of getting drunk rather than as an accompaniment to
food. Researchers say American young people engage in dangerous "binge
drinking" far too often and far more often than some of their European
counterparts, who learn to drink in the open. The
There are several empirical problems with the line of
argument as it is stated. The first is
that, as will be evident from Table 4, European teenagers are at least as
likely as American to initiate drinking under the local legal age. The fourth column of Table 4 also suggests
that the
Perhaps most importantly, the evidence that a solution of
“educational efforts” would have much success is not compelling, at the level
of the individual educational program (Room & Paglia, 1999), let alone at
the level of the society. Examples of
societies which have successfully changed their patterns on hazardous drinking
and drunken comportment are hard to find (Room, 1992). Considering the
development of amounts and patterns of drinking in western Europe in the last
50 years, Simpura (2001) concludes that changes in “qualitative features of
drinking” may
take
decades and even longer to become visible.
Some traditional qualitative features of drinking seem very persistent
to change, even in the midst of major quantitative changes in consumption
levels etc. Therefore, the analysis of
this report suggests that the natural time frame for changes in drinking
patterns is a generation, rather than a decade or any shorter period. If this is accepted, it implies that efforts
to prevent alcohol-related harm by measures targeted at drinking patterns will
produce gains only in the very long run, if ever.
On the other side of the argument, it must be
acknowledged that there has been one substantial change already in drinking
patterns in the
Underage drinking can be
reduced – but what then?
There
is little question, from data predominantly from the U.S., but also from Canada
and Australasia, that changing the drinking age affects levels of alcohol
consumption and rates of traffic crashes in the applicable ages, and to some
extent also at lower ages (Wagenaar & Toomey, 2002), though the effects on
other health and social problems are less clear. A Danish study, too, has recently found an
effect on consumption levels of instituting a 15-year-old minimum age for
purchases for off-premise consumption (Møller, 2002). In this case, the effect extended also above
age 15, which may have reflected a sensitization of Danish parents by the
public debate about the measure to watching over their children’s
drinking.
But stiffer policing of under-age drinking presumably has
its limits, in a circumstance where alcohol is readily available to those over
legal age. Despite much police pressure, marijuana -- though not legally
available -- has not disappeared from the life of young American adults. In the case of alcohol, repression may in the
end provoke a rebound, as Prohibition did among American youths in the 1920s
and 1930s (Room, 1984). In the context
of official repression, drinking -- and indeed intoxication – became a symbol
of a generational rebellion. As a member
of that generation remarked, looking back, “drinking, we proved to ourselves
our freedom as individuals and flouted Congress.... It was the only period in
which a fellow could be smug and slopped concurrently” (Liebling, 1981:667).
Even if there is no rebound, there will still be a
substantial residue of drinking under the age of 21 in the
Environmental
strategies such as high taxes on alcohol and reducing the general availability
of alcohol can be brought into play, and will have some effect (Toomey &
Wagenaar, 2002). But, again, the effect
will have its limits.
The general policy
choices at that point are by now familiar from the world of illicit drugs,
although there are differences in their application in the case of underage
drinking. One choice is the “zero-tolerance”
model. Underage drinking is vigorously
pursued, if necessary with urine testing, and those detected are punished,
secondarily deterred or “treated”, hopefully back into line. Public attitudes in the
A second choice is an
institutionalized “patterned evasion” of norms. This is how marijuana smoking
is handled these days in much of Europe and parts of the
A third choice is a
“harm reduction” strategy, which involves acknowledging the reality of youthful
drinking, in the course of making provision to reduce the harms associated with
it. This third strategy, for instance,
is pursued by the Norwegian local police in dealing with russefeiring.
Each year the elected leaders for that year’s celebration negotiate in
considerable detail with the local authorities which public rules are available
to individual participants to be broken (with the achievement of breaking it
marked by a trophy sign on the russefeiring costume). The adult world has made various unsuccessful
attempts to eliminate russefeiring, but given that these have failed,
there is no hesitation in falling back on minimizing the harm.
The approach to
underage drinking by American colleges traditionally included some elements
also of harm reduction, along with the patterned evasion strategy. But in the last two decades, a harm reduction
strategy has been becoming more difficult for them: to acknowledge that illegal
behavior is going on puts them at risk of legal liability for adverse
consequences. More generally, American culture seems to be uncomfortable with
the uneasy compromises with the undesirable which harm reduction strategies
often involve. The trend thus seems to be towards the first choice. This is, of
course, the policy choice that offers the best target for a potential future
generational rebellion. As we have
noted,
While some young people,
particularly in the
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Table 1. Mean and standard
deviation of the acceptable age for 15 contested behaviors,
according to
|
Mean |
Standard Deviation |
go out on a date |
16.2 |
1.4 |
buy a lottery ticket |
17.4 |
2.3 |
drive a car by him/herself |
17.7* |
1.5 |
get a fulltime job,
year-round |
17.7 |
2.3 |
Smoke a cigarette |
18 |
2.4 |
have sex with a
girl/boyfriend |
18.4 |
2.2 |
buy a pack of cigarettes |
18.6 |
1.9 |
have a drink of beer |
18.8* |
1.7 |
try some marijuana |
18.8 |
2.2 |
become a regular smoker |
19 |
2.6 |
have drink of liquor |
19.3* |
2 |
get drunk on beer at home |
19.4 |
2.3 |
buy a six-pack of beer |
19.5* |
1.7 |
go to a bar with friends
and drink enough to feel the effects |
19.8* |
1.9 |
move in with a
girl/boyfriend |
20.1 |
2.6 |
* Mean age significantly
lower for a female to do this than a male.
Differences between the genders were all less than half a year.
Note that this is based on
those who gave an age for the behavior, i.e., excluding those
who said it was “never OK”.
Source: Paglia & Room,
1998.
Table 2. Mean (and
standard deviation) of the acceptable age given, by grade in school (1997
Behavior |
Grade |
Adult Age Group |
|||||||||
|
Total |
7 |
9 |
11 |
13 |
Total |
18-24 |
25-39 |
40-54 |
55+ |
|
By A Male: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Smoke a cigarette |
16.4 (2.5) |
17.1a |
15.9b |
16.1b |
17.1a |
18.1 (2.4) |
17.4 |
18.1 |
18.2 |
18.3 |
|
Try marijuana |
16.3 (2.6) |
17.7a |
15.9b |
15.8b |
17.0a |
18.9 (2.3) |
18.5a |
18.8a |
18.5a |
20.4b |
|
Have drink of beer |
16.7 (2.6) |
17.7a |
16.4b |
16.2b |
17.3a |
18.9 (1.6) |
18.2a |
19.0b |
18.9b |
19.0b |
|
Buy 6-pack of beer |
18.0 (2.3) |
19.0a |
17.9bd |
17.6bc |
18.3d |
19.6 (1.7) |
18.7a |
19.8b |
19.7b |
19.6b |
|
By A Female: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Smoke a cigarette |
16.3 (2.9) |
17.1a |
15.9b |
15.8b |
17.1a |
17.9 (2.5) |
17.9 |
17.6 |
18.2 |
17.8 |
|
Try marijuana |
16.3 (2.6) |
17.2a |
15.9b |
16.0bc |
17.0ac |
18.6 (2.2) |
18.1 |
18.5 |
18.6 |
19.2 |
|
Have drink of beer |
16.8 (2.8) |
17.7a |
16.4b |
16.2b |
17.4a |
18.6 (1.8) |
18.3 |
18.6 |
18.8 |
18.5 |
|
Buy 6-pack of beer |
18.1 (2.3) |
19.0a |
17.9bc |
17.6b |
18.3ac |
19.3 (1.7) |
19.0 |
19.2 |
19.6 |
19.3 |
|
N Range: |
448-948 |
57-186 |
130-288 |
187-337 |
71-149 |
280-577 |
49- 83 |
102-210 |
70-172 |
34-113 |
|
Note: Means with the same subscript are not significantly different at p <. 05, based on the Scheffe comparison test.
Comparisons between the students’ overall means and adults’ overall means revealed significant differences (t-tests, p<.001) for all items. N ranges in size due to the “never OK,” “don’t know” options or missing responses.
Usual ages for Grade 7 are 12-13, for Grade 9 are 14-15, for Grade 11 are 16-17, and for Grade 13 are 18-19. There was a substantial drop in the number of students who continued to Grade 13.
Source: Room & Paglia, 2001.
Table 3. Minimum ages for
purchasing alcohol, for purchasing cigarettes, and for obtaining a driver’s
license, countries of Europe and
|
Alcohol purchases |
Cigarette purchases |
Driver’s license |
|||
|
European countries |
|
European countries |
|
European countries |
|
≤15 |
1 |
0 |
8* |
0 |
0 |
6 |
16 |
6 |
0 |
7 |
0 |
0 |
42 |
17 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
11 |
1 |
18 |
16 |
0 |
16 |
47 |
23 |
1 |
19 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
20 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
21 |
1 |
50 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
*no minimum age specified.
Note that a varying number of European countries are included, due to
limits in the underlying compilations.
Minimum age specified for alcohol is the age at which some form of
alcoholic beverage can be purchased for on-premise or off-premise consumption.
Fractional minimum ages for
Sources: for alcohol: WHO, Global Status Report on Alcohol,
Table 4. Proportion
drinking 5 or more drinks on 3 or more occasions in last 30 days, proportion
drinking at all on 3 or more occasions in the last 30 days, ratio of these, and
minimum drinking age, European Study of Patterns of Alcohol and Drugs (ESPAD),
1999
Country
and
Hazardous Drinking Score (Rehm et al., in press) |
A. 5+ drinks on 3 or more occasions in last 30 days |
B. any drinking on 3 or more occasions in last 30 days |
A/B |
Minimum drinking age (any beverage & form) |
Has been drunk # age 13 |
Has been drunk in last 30 days |
|
16 |
16 |
1 |
20 |
17 |
36 |
|
24 |
25 |
0.96 |
18 |
17 |
41 |
|
31 |
34 |
0.91 |
18 |
11 |
31 |
Finland (3) |
18 |
22 |
0.81 |
18 |
33 |
54 |
Sweden (3) |
17 |
22 |
0.77 |
18 |
24 |
45 |
Latvia (3) |
14 |
24 |
0.64 |
18 |
16 |
28 |
|
31 |
55 |
0.56 |
18 |
17 |
53 |
|
9 |
16 |
0.56 |
16 |
8 |
18 |
|
30 |
58 |
0.52 |
16 |
38 |
52 |
|
12 |
23 |
0.52 |
18 |
10 |
22 |
|
10* |
21 |
0.48 |
21 |
25** |
23 |
|
12 |
25 |
0.48 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
|
14 |
29 |
0.48 |
18 |
19 |
33 |
|
30 |
65 |
0.46 |
15 |
42 |
66 |
|
16 |
36 |
0.44 |
18 |
33 |
26 |
|
22 |
53 |
0.42 |
16 |
14 |
19 |
|
10 |
26 |
0.36 |
21 |
22 |
37 |
|
17 |
49 |
0.35 |
18 |
16 |
39 |
|
12 |
35 |
0.34 |
16 |
12 |
29 |
|
5 |
18 |
0.28 |
18 |
22 |
10 |
|
8 |
31 |
0.36 |
18 |
14 |
27 |
|
8 |
36 |
0.24 |
18 |
16 |
33 |
|
6 |
26 |
0.23 |
18 |
12 |
15 |
|
9 |
50 |
0.18 |
18 |
9 |
15 |
Sources: drinking behaviors: Hibell et al., 2000, repercentaged to exclude no-answers; hazardous drinking score: Rehm et al., forthcoming; minimum drinking ages: see Table 3.
* drunk 3+ times in last 30 days. ** has been drunk in lifetime, 8th graders.