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Originally Posted by DGG
I agree with you, but I suspect one reason is that the law enforcement can prove that you have illegal levels of alcohol in your body in a comparatively easy way. It is more difficult to prove that someone is, for example, too tired to drive.
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Demonization by laziness, eh? I suspect that you're right, but would like to point out that such is a shitty basis upon which to make policy - particularly when it carries an over-the-top stigma. That is to say, if I drink four beers while watching a football game and then get into an accident, I'm relegated by society to the level of child molesters and people who beat up little old ladies. However, if I drive without my glasses while exhausted, talking on my cell phone, eating, and screaming at my kids in the backseat and I get into an accident, I'm pitied by everyone around me. Same story if a senile old man gets into his car and drives through a department store window. Of these three choices, I think that most people wouldn't hesitate before choosing the guy with four beers in his system to be next to them in traffic over the other two, and yet if all three were to get into an accident, only our beer drinker would become a social pariah.
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Personally, I believe the legal drinking age should be the same age as when you become legally adult. In most countries this would be eighteen. In Sweden, you can order alcohol at restaurants from the age of eighteen, but you have to be twenty to buy it in stores, oddly enough.
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Most laws surrounding alcohol and drugs could most aptly be described as "odd" (generously - I'd use words like hypocritical, arbitrary and stupid, personally). I don't see any reason to have any drinking age at all. Let the free market sort it out - if there's outrage that the gas station is selling beers to 14 year olds, people will boycott until they stop doing that. No need for overreaching, pointless, and unenforceable federal laws.