Today time just got away from me - I spent a lot of it helping my little sister paint a herald costume for school and prepping to head back to college.
Day 03: Your views on drugs and alcohol
Well, I may or may not be sipping a Mike's as I write this (the black cherry kind might be my favorite), so... haha.
I have never done drugs and never plan to. Having watched somebody close to me go through quitting cigarettes and dealing with the urges years later, I can't imagine ever doing that to my body. I'm a little picky about what goes into my body - I've avoided caffeine dependency and try not to take medicine unless I need it.
That being said, I don't really care if other people take drugs. If you want to get high, who am I to stop you? It only concerns me when your drug-addled self shoots somebody or pulls a dui. So I don't think we should outlaw drugs, but we should crack down on drug-induced crimes.
I'm half Irish, so my views on alcohol should be self evident. :-P Seriously though, I have no problem with it. My parents have always had a very open attitude about drinking, preferring me to experiment and learn my boundaries with them rather than while I'm off at college or something. While I haven't taken them up on it until very recently, it's helped me to have a very healthy view of alcohol. I don't need it to have fun, but I like drinking a little sometimes to wind down or casually at a party. And I'm developing a taste for wine.
I see no reason why the drinking age shouldn't be 18. There are so many arguments for it - we can go to war then, we can buy cigarettes and lotto tickets, we can go to "real" jail - in every other legal sense we are considered adults at that point, why can't we drink then? The impetus was concern over drunk driving. I propose that we need to change our views on alcohol.
Since Prohibition rolled through (which was largely driven by Protestants railing against the evils of alcohol - fun fact: Welch's grape juice was originally conceived and marketed as "unfermented grape juice" specifically as an alternative to wine), America has not had a healthy relationship with alcohol. The frat scene makes no sense to me - the culture where you drink to the point of not remembering your night. But somehow that's considered acceptable in college. Other cultures, notably French and Italian, view wine as a food rather than alcohol, and this is reflected in those countries' cuisines. Now, other cultures have their problems with alcohol. A research project my wine history class did showed that other countries are trying to change their relationship with alcohol. Fairly recently, Ireland outlawed happy hours - periods of time where the price of drinks is marked down - as they have recognized the effects that rampant alcoholism has had in a place where children are weaned on whiskey.
So alcohol itself is not bad, and I don't think we should be taught that. It is something to be used intelligently and in moderation. You can have a lot of fun sober and a lot of fun after just a couple drinks. And I can promise you that the next morning will be much more fun under those circumstances.
So I will leave you with the refrain of one of the many Irish drinking songs in my repertoire, a marvelous ditty called "Beer, Beer, Beer:"
He must have been an admiral
A sultan or a king.
And to his praises
We shall always sing.
Oh, look what he has done for us,
He's filled us up with cheer.
Lord bless Charlie Mops
The man who invented
Beer, beer, beer, tiddly
Beer, beer, beer
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