Lower the Drinking Age For Alcohol & Raise the Legal Age for Broccoli Consumption
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Lower the Drinking Age For Alcohol & Raise the Legal Age for Broccoli Consumption Binge
drinking problem solved. Next up
Cancer. Wait you need a little more
explanation? OK here I go:
Alcohol use
in underage kids is an issue. Heard this
morning that 1800 kids die per year on college campuses alone, add in those untold
numbers that happen outside of the college arena and yeah, it’s an issue. As a father of two boys, one now over the
legal age and one trying like heck to get there, and I have some skin in the
game as well and here is my well thought out solution. LOWER THE DRINKING AGE TO 14 AND TELL KIDS
THEY CANNOT HAVE BROCCOLI UNTIL THEY ARE 21.
Let’s unpack
the first part of my ingenious solution---lowering the drinking age. When I was a kid (oh shoot I just became my
dad) the drinking age was 18. At this
age you typically were on your way out of high school and heading towards work,
military, or college. No matter what you
picked you could get drunk while doing so.
This was two years after most of us were allowed to start driving and
when a couple of idiots combined the driving with the drinking the proverbial
crap hit the fan, and with good reason.
Drunk driving kills and in 1984 then President Ronald Reagan signed a
law raising the drinking age to 21. He tied
the law to federal highway funds and a couple of states held out, but in the
end money talks and the drinking age was raised. Conveniently I was 21 when all this went down,
and the kids behind me were pissed. I
got drunk and laughed at them.
The National
Highway Traffic Safety administration is on record stating that this higher
drinking age is responsible for saving 900 lives per year[1]
and that is awesome. But remember we
lose 1800 college kids a year to binge drinking[2]. Thus, my recommendation to lower the drinking
age to 14. This will give the kids two
years of getting drunk and crashing their bicycles to figure out that drinking
and driving don’t mix and four years before college to figure out that binge
drinking is for losers. Brilliant! Sure, we may lose some kids in the process,
but we all know the gene pool has a shallow end and will cross that bridge when
we get to it. Let’s just try it without
any evidenced based BS to slow us down.
Now the
broccoli part. Kids always want what they
can’t have so let’s ban something good for them and pull some of this reverse
psychology crap on them. No broccoli
until you are 21 and not a day sooner.
Kids will hear this and immediately head for the crisper in the fridge
for a quick hit. High school parking
lots will be strewn with broccoli stems from kids cutting class to get a hit
off of some Mexican broccoli. “My cousin knows a guy who threw these stems over
Trump’s wall. Stuff’s packed with vitamin
C!” Folate will become the new fentanyl and parents everywhere will smile when
they find some broccoli buds in their kid’s pockets while doing laundry. Same smile we used when we pulled that Easter
Bunny stunt on them.
Binge.
Drinking. Solved.
If you have
another issue you want me to fix drop me a note at dennis@dennisgillan.com
Dennis Gillan is a mental health
advocate and his website is www.dennisgillan.com His twitter handle is dgillan and Instagram
is dennisgillan. He is a tireless
warrior for suicide prevention and he is too old for Snapchat. Dennis has been sober for 8,347 days and he
wishes that number was higher. You can
read reviews of his talk here: https://www.facebook.com/DennisGillanSpeaker/
[1] National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "Lives Saved in 2008 by
Restraint Use And Minimum Drinking Age Laws." DOT HS 811 153.
June 2009.
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