Pp. 654-677 in: Bonnie, R.J. & O’Connor, M.E., eds. Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2004.

DRINKING AND COMING OF AGE IN A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Robin Room

Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs

Stockholm University, Sveaplan

S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

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 U.S. system imposes elaborate legal restrictions and requirements in an attempt to ensure they have a "proper childhood".

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 U.S. start doing so before the legal drinking age.

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 Ontario (Paglia and Room, 1998). In 1996, adults in Ontario were asked “Regardless, of what the law says, how old do you think a male/female should be before it’s OK for him/her” to engage in each of a list of behaviors, with random halves being asked the questions for a male and for a female. For all behaviors except having a fulltime job, driving a car alone, and going on a date, some respondents volunteered that it was “never OK”, with rates below 10% for buying a lottery ticket, drinking beer or liquor, and buying beer, and above 40% for getting drunk on beer at home, being a regular smoker, and trying marijuana. Table 1 shows responses among those aged 25 or older for those who did give an age when it is OK. Ages for it being acceptable to drink or purchase alcohol were in the upper half of the ages for the behaviors asked about, ranging between 18.8 and 19.8. Thus the age of acceptability for buying a lottery ticket, driving a car alone, getting a fulltime job, smoking a cigarette, or having sex with a girl/boyfriend was lower than the age for having a drink of beer. Of the behaviors asked about, only moving in with a girl/boyfriend had a higher age of acceptability than any of the alcohol items.

Table 2 compares the responses of Ontario teenagers and adults, grouped by age, on acceptable ages to try marijuana and initiate cigarette smoking, beer drinking, and buying a six-pack of beer (Room & Paglia, 2001). It will be seen that for all behaviors the normative age of initiation is gently curvilinear by age, with the lowest age given by those who are themselves at about that age (Grade 11 students would usually be 16 or 17). At the level of the “public norms” which tend to be measured in response to a telephone survey (for the adults) or to items on a questionnaire (for the students), the variation between generations is fairly modest. For the two alcohol items, for instance, the average difference between 11th-graders and the 40-54-year-old adults, roughly their parents’ generation, is about 2½ years.

The alcohol normative ages given by Ontario adults correspond fairly well to the legal minimum age for purchasing or drinking alcohol in Ontario, which is 19. However, the actual ages at which Ontario teenagers start experimenting with drinking alcoholic beverages is about five years younger. Among students in Grade 7 (ages 12-13), 32% report alcohol use in the past 12 months, with 58% having used at some time in their lives; in Grades 9 and 11 the proportions drinking in the past 12 months rise to 55% and 80% respectively (Adlaf et al., 1997: Table 10 & Fig. 57). These five years provide an ample arena for contests between the generations. However, the results in Table 2 suggest that younger experimenters with alcohol see themselves as breaking rather than conforming to the norms of their own age-cohort. In the earlier teenage years, to drink is to do something you’re not supposed to be doing yet.

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 U.S. system is not necessarily final -- for many, there are second and third chances -- sorting schoolchildren into different schools or different “tracks” in the same school is also potentially fateful.

Before they are teenagers, children have also begun to sort themselves out into differentiated crowds and cliques. A 9-year-old child in the U.S. can usually give an accurate ethnography of the characteristics of those who can be found at recess at different corners of the playground. The American community high school may include adolescents from all parts of the community, but it has long been documented that in their social lives the students are heavily differentiated and sorted by social class, as well as by personal preferences and friendships (Hollingshead, 1961).

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 Pakistan, for instance, it may be customary for parents to make an advantageous marriage for their daughter at age 13. But in a Nordic context, such a practice is seen as shocking, so far outside expectations concerning the “social clock” that legislation must be passed and programs initiated to counter it (e.g., Ministry of Children and Family Affairs, 2001).

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 U.S. is at the low end in terms of ages at which youths can be put at risk of harm equivalent to adults. For instance, the U.S. remains one of two countries which has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, apparently in part over the minimum ages specified for enlisting in military service and for capital punishment. The age at which a person can be tried for a crime as an adult, rather than as a juvenile, is lower in many states of the U.S. than in European countries.

On the other hand, with respect to minimum drinking age, the U.S. is at the high end internationally (see Table 3). No country has a higher minimum age, and few have an age as high as in the U.S. At first sight, at least, the U.S. seems to be in a contradictory position on these matters. Perhaps one clue to the contradiction is the fact that the debate about minimum drinking age in the U.S. mostly revolved around and was decided in terms of traffic casualties. In an automobile-oriented culture, with inadequate public transport in much of the country, so that parents are pressed into service as the chauffeurs for children under the age for a driving license, the idea of raising the driving age has seemed impossible, and raising the drinking age became the only feasible alternative for reducing the serious carnage from teenage driving.

Table 3 makes it clear that Europe has tended toward a different solution to separating inexperienced driving and inexperienced drinking. The age for obtaining a driver’s license is higher in most parts of Europe than in most parts of the U.S.

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, Italy, for instance, is scored at 1, the U.S. at 2, Sweden at 3, and Russia at 4. While the proportion of drinking occasions which are relatively heavy is factored into the scale, the scale does not include the dimension of demeanor while drunk, that is, the extent to which norms for drunken behavior allow for violence or other bad behavior. Nevertheless, cross-nationally this dimension appears to cluster with the dimensions which are included in the scale (Rehm et al., 2001). In a factor analysis of data from ethnographic records in the different frame of traditional tribal and village societies, Partanen (1991:213) also found that violence was particularly associated with a pattern of intermittent but heavy drinking occasions.

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 U.S., with higher rates of trouble in the American South, and more generally in the traditionally “dryer” southern and prairie regions (Cahalan & Room, 1974; Room, 1982).

Differences at the level of young people and youth cultures

In societies like the U.S., the drinking patterns which are described as characteristic of the upper end of the scale of hazardous drinking are quite characteristic of a particular segment of the population, that is, the drinking of adolescents and young adults, particularly young males. This raises the question whether there is simply an upward shift in the hazardous drinking scale for young adults’ drinking in different cultures, with the cultures maintaining their relative positions, or whether cultural differences in the extent of hazardous drinking are muted or overriden by drinking patterns in a common youth culture. The ethnographic literature has traditionally held to the former position: it has been common to argue, in an American context, that American drinking customs would be improved if children were taught to drink with diluted wine at the family dinner table, as traditionally in France or Italy (Heath, 1995:339). However, behind this argument lies the assumption that teaching one use-value of alcohol is necessarily preventive of moving on to other use-values. This seems a problematic assumption. It is quite typical, for instance, that the early experiences of drinking of young American teenagers do not involve intoxication, but this holds no implication that they will not be drinking to intoxication three years later.

Ethnographic and news reports about young people’s drinking in southern Europe these days do not sound so different from patterns in north American cultures. For instance, it is reported that on weekend nights in Madrid 200,000 youths gather in 24 central city squares, swigging such drinks as cheap red wine mixed with Coca-Cola until 4 a.m., in a style of street parties known as the botellón (Tremlett, 2002). Adult perceptions in southern Europe are often that these patterns have changed from the time of their youths: that the youth nowadays are drinking in an “anglo-saxon” style, treating alcohol as a psychoactive drug. Among the student informants in Pyorälä’s study (1995), the Spanish but not the Finns reported a gender gap, with the older generation less accepting of drinking to intoxication. And, indeed, there is much that has changed in the environment of young people in southern Europe in the last half-century which might have lent itself to cultural change. The societies are less authoritarian, marriage and family formation occur later, and there is more money in young people’s pockets. Increasingly, young people in different societies are tied together as a single audience for media and music, and for the promotions of the alcoholic beverage multinationals.

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 Italy feature plenty of heavy drinking. One of their informants noted that “you have to drink, to show incredible powers of endurance to alcohol”. But the attachment of the parties to an occasion which extends back in history, and features of the parties such as traditional drinking games, suggest that the parties do not constitute a new cultural innovation.

The somewhat puzzling findings concerning attitudes and norms on drinking among adults in northern and southern Europe (Room & Bullock, forthcoming) suggest that differences in norms about how drunk one may get, and how one may behave at a given level of drunkenness, are not straightforward. But some customs in the north seem to stand out. There seems to be no equivalent elsewhere, for instance, of the Norwegian tradition of russefeiring, in which each high school graduating class (with some pre-echoes in the graduating class from middle school) devotes the 17 days between May Day and the Norwegian national day to a drunken rite of passage, with negotiated rule-breaking which is both individualistic and collectively organized (Sande, 2002).

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 U.S. study. The countries in Table 4 are ordered according to the results in the fourth column, that is, in terms of a ratio reflecting the proportion of drinking occasions for which respondents reported drinking 5+ drinks (in the U.S. data, being drunk). This might be taken as an indication of the extent to which heavy drinking occasions predominate in 15-year-olds’ drinking. The U.S. falls at the median on this table, in terms of this ratio, with about half as many respondents reporting being drunk at least 3 times in the last 30 days as report drinking any amount at least 3 times in the same period. While there are some surprises in the order on this ratio (Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine are unexpectedly low, and Malta somewhat high), the ratio generally follows pretty well the hazardous drinking scores assigned for the society as a whole (Rehm et al., forthcoming). By this measure, then, there does seem to be some relation between teenage drinking patterns and the drinking patterns of the larger society.

In terms of the actual proportion drinking 3 or more times in the last 30 days, the U.S. is in the fourth lowest position; in two of the three societies with lower percentages, lack of resources is likely to be one factor keeping the frequency of drinking down. The U.S. also appears to be at the lower end of the distribution on proportions regularly drinking heavily, although no exact comparison on drinking 5 or more drinks is available (26% of U.S. 10^th-graders reported drinking that much at least once in the last 2 weeks). Compared to Europe, U.S. teenagers are less likely regularly to drink at all, and seem to be somewhat less likely regularly to drink heavily. In several countries -- the United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland and Denmark -- the proportion of teenagers drinking 5+ drinks on at least 3 occasions in the last month is substantially greater than the proportion of U.S. teenagers drinking that much at least once in the last two weeks.

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. U.S. 10^th graders are less likely to report having been drunk in the last 30 days than 15-year-olds in many western European countries. On the other hand, the U.S. is further up the ordering in terms of early drunkenness, comparing the proportion of U.S. 8^th-graders who report having ever been drunk with the proportions of Europeans who retrospectively report having been drunk by the age of 13.

Trends and concerns about teenage drinking in Europe

The ESPAD study also offers the broadest set of quantitative data on changes in teenage drinking in Europe, since the questions asked in 1999 in many of the countries involved had also been asked in an earlier survey in 1995. The general trend from 1995 to 1999 in many countries was for an increase in the proportion of 15-16-year-olds reporting drinking 5+ drinks on 3 or more occasions in the last 30 days (Hibell et al, 2000:71). The increased proportion was considerable in the three countries which already had the highest rates (Ireland, Denmark and the U.K.) and in Poland and Slovenia, but there were also increases in 5 other countries, while the proportion stayed much the same in 9 countries. In no country had there been a substantial decrease.

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 United States, and measures and programs to counter it have been generally soft and not particularly effective. The discussion about alcopops in Denmark did result in a law imposing a minimum age limit (of 15) for off-premise purchases of alcohol, which seems to have some effect (Møller, 2002). Countries which have traditionally had fairly restrictive alcohol controls (the Nordic countries other than Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland), for instance on bar and liquor store closing hours and days, have continued to loosen the controls (Karlsson & Österberg, 2001), raising the effective availability for youth as well as others. In Ireland, which has seen an extraordinary rise in alcohol consumption (46% in 11 years), with high rates of drinking among teenagers (see Table 4), a Strategic Task Force on Alcohol (2002) has called for increased taxes, among other measures. In the United Kingdom, the primary policy focus has been on “drunken yobs” (Hinsliff, 2002) and “alcohol-related crime, disorder and violence” (U.K. Home Office, 2000), including proposals to increase regulation and legislation around underage drinking. But the government effort has lacked such crucial components as a scheme to provide “proof of age” documentation, a task which has been left in the hands of an alcohol industry organization (Portman Group, 2000). As in the example from Norway, harm reduction efforts are also common in much of Europe. Institutional legal liability for underage drinking is much less likely outside the U.S.

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. Turkey’s legal age of marriage is being raised from 17 for men and 15 for women to 18 for both genders, as part of a modernization of the civil code pushed forward as part of applying for membership in the European Union. The code which is being replaced was itself based on Swiss family law in 1926, adopted as “the most modern code of its time” (Fraser, 2001). The lines of influence probably flow mostly from the centre to the periphery, so that the discourse in the United States is not strongly influenced these days by provisions and arguments from elsewhere.

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 Ontario in 1979 was to move legal drinking out of the ages of high school attendance. As we have noted, the relation of minimum drinking age to minimum driving age and driving customs is particularly relevant in the U.S.; one argument that has been given for discounting European experience is that “youth drive less frequently in Europe than in the U.S.” (National Advisory Council..., 2002:52).

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 U.S.:

“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 United States should take lessons from cultures like those of Jews, Italians and Greeks, who traditionally focus on misuse of alcohol, rather than simple use of alcohol, as the source of problems. "Educational efforts should encourage moderate use of alcohol among those who choose to drink," explains sociologist David J Hanson (1996:45).

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 U.S. is about in the middle of the range of European countries when it comes to the proportion of teenage drinking which in U.S. terminology is now often called binge drinking. And there is no clear relationship, viewed cross-nationally in the table, between the minimum drinking age and the proportion of binge occasions among teenage drinking occasions. As we have seen, there is also some evidence of a generational shift in teenage drinking patterns in southern Europe, moving towards more “binge drinking”.

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 United States over a period of about a generation – the shift away from drinking before driving. Given U.S. culture’s dependence on the automobile, this has certainly been a significant change, even if an incomplete one. But an effort to reduce rates of drinking before age 21 to insignificance seems to be taking on a much more difficult task, particularly in a cultural environment saturated in promotion of drinking in youth-oriented media, and in a legal environment where restrictions on alcohol advertising and promotion are increasingly constitutionally suspect (Hudson, 2002).

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 U.S. at any time in the foreseeable future. Which leaves open the question, what is the best way to handle the discrepancy -- which exists in Europe as well as in the U.S. -- between the actual ages at which teenagers start drinking and the age at which the behavior becomes legal? Age-specific prohibition is more likely to reduce the frequency of drinking than the amount drunk on an occasion. In fact, a rigorous enforcement, while resulting also in fewer intoxicated occasions, may well raise the proportion of drinking occasions which involve intoxication.

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 U.S. generally do not support the application of such an approach with anything like the rigour used for illicit drugs, except perhaps in connection with drinking and driving.

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 U.S. If the young cannabis smoker does not insist on lighting up on the steps of the police station, but keeps the use within private space, he or she is generally let alone. The police, however, retain the possibility of a “drug bust” as a handy lever in the pursuit of their duties, which tends to mean that the strategy results in quite a lot of arrests and police records, potentially on a discriminatory basis. Institutionalised patterned evasion was the traditional approach of American colleges to underage drinking, prior to the last two decades.

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, Europe does not seem to be moving in the same direction, in terms of policy choices.

While some young people, particularly in the U.S., remain abstainers, drinking and intoxication seem to be involved in the process of growing up for many young people in all societies with European roots. One way or another, the damage from the intoxication to the drinker and to others can be reduced, but it is unlikely in the foreseeable future that it will be eliminated. Nor is it likely that state actions can succeed in cutting off all drinking below the age of 21. In these circumstances, there is a need to look not only at means of prevention of underage drinking, but also at means of handling it so as to minimize the adverse consequences. Among these adverse consequences I would include any lasting stigma and its adverse effects on those found to be drinking. There is also a need for a greater understanding of the place of drinking and intoxication in the various subcultures and social worlds of young people. U.S. researchers and policymakers have much to gain from encouraging a greater internationalism in studying these issues.

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Table 1. Mean and standard deviation of the acceptable age for 15 contested behaviors,

according to Ontario adults aged 25 or older, 1996

	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 Ontario student survey), and by adult age group (1996 Ontario survey).

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 U.S. states

	Alcohol purchases		Cigarette purchases		Driver’s license
	European countries	U.S. states	European countries	U.S. states	European countries	U.S. states
≤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. Netherlands is counted as 16; this age limit is effective 2003.

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 U.S. driver’s licenses coded to the lower year; e.g., 16 years 9 months is classed with 16. Ages are for full (not learner’s) licenses.

Sources: for alcohol: WHO, Global Status Report on Alcohol, Geneva: WHO, 1999; ICAP, Drinking age limits, ICAP Reports 4, Washington: International Center for Alcohol Policy, revised March 2002; for cigarettes: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/who/whoeupro.htm; for driver’s licenses, U.S.: http://golocalnet/drive; Europe: http://www.theaa.com/staticdocs/pdf/allaboutcars/overseas/european_motoring_advice.pdf

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
Iceland (3)	16	16	1	20	17	36
Norway (3)	24	25	0.96	18	17	41
Poland (3)	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
Ireland (3)	31	55	0.56	18	17	53
Macedonia (3)	9	16	0.56	16	8	18
United Kingdom (2)	30	58	0.52	16	38	52
Hungary (3)	12	23	0.52	18	10	22
U.S.A. (2)	10*	21	0.48	21	25**	23
Croatia (3)	12	25	0.48	18	19	20
Estonia (3)	14	29	0.48	18	19	33
Denmark (2)	30	65	0.46	15	42	66
Russia (Moscow) (4)	16	36	0.44	18	33	26
Malta (1)	22	53	0.42	16	14	19
Ukraine (3)	10	26	0.36	21	22	37
Czech Republic (2)	17	49	0.35	18	16	39
France (1)	12	35	0.34	16	12	29
Romania (3)	5	18	0.28	18	22	10
Slovakia (3)	8	31	0.36	18	14	27
Lithuania (3)	8	36	0.24	18	16	33
Portugal (1)	6	26	0.23	18	12	15
Greece (2)	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, 8^th graders.