Sorry, didn't realise.....
But I remeber when I was a 'boy' ...... the drinking age was 21 here in Western Australia but when I was 19 yo it was changed to 18 years because we were sending our boys over to Vietnam to fight at 18+ but they couldn't vote, place a bet on a horse, sign a legal document, or have a drink!!!!!
In Europe there doesn't seem to be any age barrier, kids in Italy & France have a glass of wine with thier food in a restaurent / cafe, and nothing is said.
John
Well, to clarify, there is no national drinking age, offically. Each state sets the age. But over the last 20 years, under pressure from Washington, usually under threat of withholding federal highway funding, every state has since raised its drinking age to 21.
When I was in high school (class of '82), here in PA, the age was 21, as it is now and always has been. But in the surrounding states--from my location, that's New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, it was lower, most were 18, I think. So, there was always a lot of traffic over the state lines to buy alcohol in those states and bring it back. Also, Pennsylvania has a state monopoly on the sale of hard liquor, and maintains tight control over the sale of beer and wine, all under the aegis of the Liquor Control Board. PA owns liquor stores, which we still refer to as "state stores", though the LCB hired some marketing people and applied their Newspeak, and officially, they're known as "Wine and Spirits Shops". As the name implies, you buy wine and liquors there. If you want beer, you go to a vendor known as a distributor, who sells beer by the case or keg. If you want a six-pack or individual bottles, you can buy them from a bar (which has what's often referred to as a "tavern license"). Only recently has the LCB allowed an experiment to sell six-packs and individual bottles in grocery stores (the Wegman's chain, headquartered in Rochester, NY, is the pilot), and even then, the LCB had to do some shuffling to get around the exisiting regulations (the beer is not located in the store's grocery aisles, but in the hot food-takeout cafe, so the bureaucrats can designate it as a restaurant. Technically, it's not a grocery store that's selling it, but its fast-food cafe). We're still a ways off from the beer aisle that I saw in the Safeway near my cousin's home in Woodbridge, Virginia, a beer aisle that had a better selection that most distributors here in PA, too.
And then of course, wineries and microbreweries, and brewpubs, can sell their product to the public. But it wasn't too long ago, either, that the LCB still didn't open its stores on Sundays.
Fortunately, there is a glimmer on the horizon. Once again, there is a push in our General Assembly to dissolve the LCB and the state monopoly, and fully privatize the system. Tom Ridge included that in his platform, when he first ran for governor, but he didn't follow up (and I didn't vote for him the second time around, partly because of that), and the effort is back. Resistance comes mostly from the state store employees' union and the beer distributors' trade associations, and some citizens groups who think that privatizing will lead to more readily available liquor (though, the state store employees are propagandizing that if the LCB is dissolved, alcohol sellers will form a monopoly, which is precisely what the state store system represents). For me, I want to be able to walk into a grocery store and buy one bottle of beer. Just to be able to do it. Then I'll down it and I'll head to my distributor and pick up a case of Franziskaner.
Prost!
Brad