Germany considers raising legal drinking age to 18

TZ-Online: Schützt ein Verbot unsere Kinder?

German politicians are discussing whether or not to increase the legal age for consumption of alcohol to 18 after a 16-year-old almost died after drinking 52 shots of Tequila.

Isn't is only 16 for beer anyway? So a 16 year old drinking tequila was already breaking the law. And I doubt an 18 year old would have handled 52 shots of tequila any better.

52??!! How do you manage that without first throwing up/falling sleep... anyway - I doubt raising the age would stop that kind of thing from ever happening again...

i haven't made up my mind yet.
near my office, there are several (inner city) schools and most (male) pupils buy beer for lunch. bloody idiots. they think they look cool and/or mature when holding a bottle of beer in their hands. wishful thinking on their side imo. (i keep thinking what a waste of tax payers money as teachers won't be able to teach them much after lunch)

I agree totally with SiM, exactly what I was going to say!

They stop for lunch? They knock off at 1 o'clock. At least they do at my daughters school. I've always considered the attitude to alcohol very sensible here and banning teenagers from drinking won't stop them, it will just make it illegal and therefore even cooler! After all you're supposed to 18 in Britain but that didn't stop me or my mates drinking in pubs at 16. (Not at lunchtime though!)

For pity's sake, it was 40 shots of vodka that killed John Bonham and he was well over 18.

Edit: He was actually 32 when he died. Sweet sweating jesus, that's a young age to die.

My son (17) has at least a couple of days a week with a 1 or 2 hour gap around midday.

On some of them he & his classmates go to local Chinese and eat the midday offering.
At least thats better than going to McDoof.

And they dont drink alcohol...

i think the present regulation is ok.

I say raise it to 21...

I don't know if most Americans agree with me on this... but looking back, all the time I'd spend out with friends hunting around for beer was probably more fun than when we actually had it. Later, in school the age limit forced us to have house parties, which were always more crazy and fun than normal old bars.

Then again, if you want the kids to be safer keep it how it is.. but I think 21 is more fun

What a useless idea.. if someone wants to drink 50 shots of vodka they're going to drink 50 shots of vodka (well, up until they pass out anyway).. there are stupid people everywhere, it doesn't matter about the age..

haha.. some truth in that thefirelane.. I remember when I wasn't old enough to drink, we'd have many adventures trying to get it, and man, once you got it you'd just drink and drink until your threw up! If it had been legal that definitely would have taken the appeal away and I'd probably have stopped at a few..

I don't agree with raising it to 21 (I think voting, tobacco, alcohol, military service, etc. should all start at 19) but I see your point. Thwarting the law really was fun and house parties do beat the shit out of bars.

Hmm...16 does seem like a kid to me so I could see 18. That said, folks here raised under the 16-year-old rule seem to have just as healthy an attitude toward drinking as folks I know from 18 and 21 minimum countries.

When I was in high school in Chicago, the minimum age to buy beer or hard alcohol was 21. That didn't stop anyone I knew that wanted to drink...from buying or from drinking.

In fact, it might have made it more enticing for them to drink hard alcohol instead of beer - which I would assume is more likely to lead to the 'ODing' incidents like the tequila example.

A single bottle can provide a faster route to drunkenness for more people and it is easier to "borrow" a bottle from parents and transport discreetly versus a big multi-pack of beer.

Now I'm curious - do shopkeepers here actually check the age when someone buys beer or alcohol? I'm wayyy over that age minimum so I have no idea!

I don't think you should be allowed to be a teenager until you're at least 20 yrs old.

growing up in an environment where i could drink legally at 16, i disagree with increasing the legal age.
when i started uni in the uk, i was surprised about the drinking habit of the freshers (not just them). i have been 'there' 3-4 years ago and thought it was rather late and no different to a 16yrs old (or younger ).

And think of the huge industry that is "Fake IDs" in the States. If not for the 21 min, think of all the bar bouncers that would miss out on many a good laugh when little 18 year olds show them a homemade license or an expired license from a random state that has different hair color, height and ethnicity than they do.

The best was freshman year of college when a whole gaggle of kids would all show up with poorly made fakes from Kansas or any other state hundreds of miles from where they were!

Ha!

I actually think it is fine how it is.

So many college kids die each year in the States, because they are out of their parents' house, go to frat parties and don't know how much they can handle. At my school a freshman died of alcohol poisoning in the third week of classes and that was the third alcohol-related death at colleges that semester!

Here most kids still live at home when they first have alcohol, and that way (usually) someone does look after them, and they can find out what their limits are more slowly.

The age limit is 16 only for beer and wine anyway, so this guy was not following the law anyway, what makes any politician think he would if the age was 18 for everything with alcohol?!

People who are stupid will always be stupid, regardless of the law.

But then for myself either way is fine, I would be able to drink anyway. I just think the way it is is fine. No one can completely prevent things like this from happening.

Each time I go to our offices near Denver the local newspaper is full of how young people are getting
seriously ill or even die after under-age drinking parties at a nearby university/college. Clearly "21" doesnt
help much there...

I think one of the two other alcohol-related deaths that year (August 2004) actually happened in CO.

True. Wasn't there a frat in CO that had a kid die during pledging because they made him drink too much... then shortly after they had another one die because they made him consume a huge quantity of water (presumably because it is 'safer')

Someone died on a US radio show after entering a water drinking contest to win, of all things, a totally gay nintendo wii.

All that needs to be said here is: making Drugs illegal is never a good idea. 'Just say No' campaigns are neither. What we need is plain information without taking moral high grounds. If someone becomes addicted then it is always because he's fleeing something. In other words, if our societies were not so inhumanely cruel, almost no one would want to get away from reality so often and far that he actually got addicted.

Drug Addiction is the essence of Capitalism.

Yeah, but now that would be working on the causes and not the symptoms, would it? Since when does society do any of that...

I'm 18, got here when I was 17 and the answer is no, ive never even been looked at twice.

I think that the lower age limit is great. For my grad ceremony we had "Dry Grad" school sponsered, super safe, super fun, and then the next night we had Wet Grad, it took place about an hour away from civilization along a narrow dirt road by a lake with lots of fun cliffs to fall off of, there were countless fights, a good 5 people i know went missing for large parts of the night, a friend of mine's brother who came with her and drove her home was too drunk to remember getting home and i myself saw 3 seprate ambulences, thankfully no one got seriously injured, but my point is that if drinking were legal at 16 or 17 in canada then we would have had a big drunken bash in a much safer central location, guests could have also been regulated and as students from other schools caused many of the fights this would have decreased casualties greatly. (sorry for the bad grammer)

I've been carded before, and I've also seen others get carded before... I think it probably depends on where you go and on the individual cashier.

I thought, with the exception of Scandinavia, Europe was always more easy going with booze than in the States. I have always admired this as mystifying booze makes kids want it all the more.

Yea, I agree with the premise, and the conclusion.

Speaking strictly from the perspective of unscientific and anecdotal evidence, with vast generalizations, and no facts or hard evidence, I’d make this guess:

a) Drinking during “prohibition� in the US caused rampant gang violence and didn’t solve anything.
b ) Drinking age of 21 in US seems to have a culture of both non-drinkers and “problem alcoholics� much higher than other countries, more division, more problems.
c) European lower drinking ages seem to create (overall) a better understanding of responsibility with alcohol, learned at a very young age… Particularly with 16 year old limit in Germany and the high beer consumption rate in Bavaria, yet no where near the (apparent) high level of problems in the US (Alcoholics, AA, drunk drivers, MAD, etc…)

Like I said, all anecdotal evidence here, but I’d put forth this theory:

Making it legal takes the “risk� and “fun� out of it. It’s no longer has such a high appeal to the “rebel� mentality, and therefore the risks seem reduced.

Same goes for drugs IMHO, education always beats prohibition for most substances (especially when comparing results per dollar, or Euro!)

Agreed, prohibition doesn't work full stop/punkt/period. 16 years of age for soft alcohol (bevvos & wine) and 18 for anything and everything else (hard liquor & drugs)

Agreed, prohibition doesn't work full stop/punkt/period. 16 years of age for soft alcohol (bevvos & wine) and ganja. 18 for anything and everything else (hard liquor & hard drugs)

16 yr old Tom, from Berlin, died yesterday, 5 weeks after downing 52 tequilas. Here is the stoy from the BZ.

What a clown! Feel sorry for his poor parents but congratulations to Tom for successfully taking himself out of the gene pool-what the hell did he think was going to happen?
Topics merged by admin

on hearing of the boy's death the landlord of the bar where he collapsed said "Als ich vom Tod des Jungen erfuhr, habe ich erst mal einen getrunken"

ahhhh the shear irony!

Expect moral panic from the politicians now about "binge drinking" and another rifle of your pockets with more tax on drink.
Sorry for the lad but it goes with the territory.

And then you get politicians on the campaign trail publicly testing 12 (count them, twelve!) different kinds of Pils and maintaining that he prefers Weißbier.


Hypocrites one and all.

For whatever the reasons may be, Germans have a much healthier attitude towards drinking than any country I know that has a higher drinking age limit. Perhaps there isn't an exact correlation there but it doese make sense.

Raising the drinking age to 21 might not stop too many teenagers getting booze but it might make it easier to prosecute those outlets where they got it from - providing these can be tracked down, of course.

You're kidding about the 21 bit, right? If a kid is old enough to go to Afghanistan in his country's uniform and shoot and be shot at, then surely he's old enough to have a drink?!

What do you base that statement on? Knowledge that you have after doing your own research, or just a hunch? Germany has a culture that is based on drinking, and along with it, social problems caused by addiction.

Does this qualify as the longest time between comment and question - a little under 2 years?

I have not done any research but seeing the difference walking around Berlin/Dresden on a night out and having done so in various UK cities there is a marked difference.

The younger people around are still drunk but not as abusive, aggressive or half as annoying. I cannot say this is down to a more sensible attitude to drinking or just a less aggressive mindset - but there is a difference.

Any one who drinks 50 shots has a change of dieing. Drinking as many things in life brings with it responsibility for the person doing it. If you drink 50 shots and survive good for you. As long as you didn't kill/harm anyone else in the process that is.

If you drink 50 and die, sorry, but you drank the stuff. If you were under age and got the stuff in a bar, tough for the bar and the person selling as well.

There has been a very lax attitude to drinking related crimes in the UK for a long time. People getting pathetic sentences for wiping out entire families while drink-driving. it's almost as if the Government do not want to start having people arrested/given long sentences for stuff as it may stop them going out and thus reduce the income from tax on the stuff they buy on a night out...

About 1 year ago, a cashier at REWE asked me for ID when I wanted to buy a bottle of wine. I guess I was used to the US, "we card anyone who looks younger than 30 policy," and showed her without thinking. When she suddenly became really really embarassed, it dawned on me. She had guessed me at 15 (instead of 21 )

Like Mariposa said, I think that even if kids are bound to act stupid, it's really good that people learn to drink while still living under their parents' roof. I spent two years at the University of Texas, which always comes up high in rankings for party schools/schools with alcohol problems, and multiple times a semsester, someone would get alcohol poisoning, and his friends would just put him to bed and leave him to die. (To some extent the friends are underage and drunk and frightened to go to a hospital or call for help) In one really sad case, frat boys drew obscene things over a guy's face and body, and it turned out he had died from alcohol poisoning.

Though obviously Germany isn't the same as Texas, I think those kinds of deaths are 100% preventable and really sad.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, which has had 21 since Prohibition. But whilst it was strictly enforced for public venues (bars, restaurants and retailers), it was understood that drinking on one's home property with parental approval and/or in loco parentis on college campuses was fine ... as long as no one got behind the wheel.

I'm almost embarassed to admit that, as house manager for a large college living group, I'd routinely sign off on 10-15 keg beer shipments for beer bashes when I was 19 years old; I couldn't walk into a bar and order a drink until almost graduation time, but it didn't matter. When dram shop law concerns washed over into a) parents throwing parties for underage drinkers on their private property and B) college campuses, it clearly resulted in more hard liquor use and "front-loading" for campus events where beer would have been served. This even killed really tame Thursday "wine and cheese" parties with the faculty and serving wine at parents weekend dinners.

The US federal government decided to create a de facto national 21 drinking age by cutting off federal highway funds to any state with an under-21 drinking age (Vermont used to be 18, and there was even a recent effort to have it brought back down again) and/or ABC laws (Virginia used to have beer at 18, wine at 19 and booze at 21, methinks).

I have to stick up for Germany here. I'm generally impressed that one seldom reads about a carload of nightclubbing teenagers runs into a bridge abutment, killing all on board. They always seem to organize a geeky girl to go dry and drive everyone home. Probably better to de-mystify it and reduce its "forbiddden (fermented) fruit" appeal.

The difference is that in Germany the boys and girls with regular alcohol poisoning, and that includes unconscious trips to the clinics and the occasional death, are generally 12 to 15 years old, occasionally younger (especially girls tend to start earlier). By the time they get to university, most people have been drinking heavily for at least 5 years, between 15 and 20% have their alcohol addiction by then, and rarely anyone gets alcohol poisoning at that age anymore. The novelty has also worn off, and of course it's not illegal, so it takes some fun out of it.


Eh, it's just that that doesn't make the news at all unless it's like 4 or 5 ppl dying at the same time, at least half are under 18, and there are more cars than just the one of the drunk driver involved. Usually needs say a pregnant woman or kids involved somewhere too for the media. Oh, or the drunk kids were 14 and stole the car. Anything other than that gets maybe a footnote in the police report section in the local news.

Fair enough. Kato. It could be a case of my not paying close enough attention to the local news.

That said, I've only seen two real knock-down-drag-out cases of drunk driving the whole time I've lived in Germany:

1) I was awakened one evening by massive tire screetches and sirens at c. 2:00AM. I opened the window and aurally tracked a chase running a big circle around the ring road near our house. The paper the next day said it was some 50-something drunk in a Mercedes 500 who say the cops, bolted, drove the wrong way on a divided road, and ended up finally crashing into someone's garden wall.

2) One evening my wife and I attended a ball in Frankfurt, and my (non-drinker) wife drove home c. 3:00AM (c. six hours past my normal bedtime). We were standing at a traffic light right off the local Autobahn exit ready to turn left onto our local a-road, and a 911 crept down next to us in the right lane. When the light turned, the Porsche lit 'em up and (as one might expect from a rear-engined car) understeered heavily, swinging the tail to the right, overcorrected and smashed the left taillights against the guardrail in front of us, then fishtailed and broke the other set against the other side guardrail, then punched it and roared through a speed camera doing at least 50 over the limit and headed off into the night. My wife had me repeating the licence plate number over and over all the way home, and she called it in.

It seems to underscore my view that the sober Fiat Punto drivers seem get the thing home safely with a cargo of drunken high school friends, but the stone drunk Firmenwagen drivers are still out there flying around.

Perhaps what also plays into it is the good public transport in most of Germany

When i use the "Moonliner" busses here in Heidelberg, or the trams around Mannheim at night, i see at least three or four kids every time that have to be dragged in and out of the bus by their friends. It seems with some of these groups that they drink exactly until the first one drops (... usually the youngest), then the whole group stops and drags that guy or girl home.

Of course with the older ones with cars there's also the police to consider. On friday and saturday nights in certain areas of town here, you can be about 80% sure that you'll be intercepted by a police car if you have a horde of drunk teenagers in the back.

The drunk older ppl driving are another thing. Just checked the local paper, police report counts off 7 traffic incidents with drunk drivers, in all cases the driver were lone 40 to 50 year olds. 2 incidents with 18 and 24 yo girls respectively, no alcohol mentioned. Oh, and two cases of drunk youth groups beating each other up.

How long has the drinking age been set to 16?

People with that sort of alcohol problem probably rarely proceed to university. When I was a teenager the only young person I heard of who had to be rushed to hospital with alcohol poisoning happened to be an English exchange student. From my experience at English and German universities the alcohol consumption at the English university was certainly much more massive.

In the current form since 1951, the previous youth protection law of 1938 didn't regulate alcohol at all.

Of course younger kids can still drink "light" alcohol like beer or wine - including in bars - if their parents are present to allow it. Beer vending machines in places accessible to kids under 16 were outlawed in 1971 or so, around the same time the age of maturity was lowered from 21 to 18 in Germany.