Why is the drinking age usually higher than the age of consent & driving age?

Question

If we look at the world map, most countries in the world have a legal drinking age of 18. Comparatively the legal driving age in many countries is as low as 16, and the age of consent is roughly similar at about 16.

Why is the legal drinking age higher than the other two? It seems clear that the other two have much more serious consequences if something goes wrong:

• Driving: in the event of a crash, the item ruined usually costs tens of thousands of dollars, plus there's a chance of serious injury or death.
• Age of consent: someone could get pregnant, with lifelong consequences. Plus there's the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

Comparatively getting drunk usually means waking up the next day with a hangover & no permanent damage. But if that's the case, then it should make sense to require a higher age on sex & driving than on drinking.

It seems to me that one explanation is that getting drunk can cause serious damage as well (e.g. the aftermath of this song) but then it also seems like higher age doesn't make this less of a risk, since once someone is drunk they are vulnerable regardless of what their age is.

Has any legislation to alter these recently been passed or proposed by a parliament, political party or prominent NGO and what were the arguments for increasing/retaining the higher drinking age?

Answer 1

If you look at the tables (rather than the map) in the Legal drinking age Wikipedia article, you will notice that many countries actually have restrictions on purchasing alcohol or serving it to under-18 but technically no “drinking age”. It's foolish to think that simply banning a behaviour will make it disappear, that's not how policy is made. On the other hand, banning the sale of alcohol to under-18 can be enforced more easily and presumably has an effect on consumption (it can be overdone however, cf. prohibition).

Age of consent laws are fundamentally different. You cannot erase all sexual behaviour in teenagers either (that's not even their purpose) and that would be exceedingly difficult to enforce. However, it is, in fact, forbidden to sell a lot of sex-related products and media, sexual services, etc. to under-18, even in countries with a lower age of consent. This is more readily analogous to restrictions on the sale of alcohol: in both cases, encouraging or supporting the behaviour is frowned upon but engaging in it isn't forbidden.

In general, modern public health efforts often focus on mitigation rather than prohibition. In the case of alcohol consumption, that's what sales restrictions are. That's also why sale and alcohol assumption is allowed in many places even if you are right that it is dangerous even for older people (incidentally, some places do impose other types of restrictions targeting all adults: inflated prices, designated shops, limited opening hours, etc.). Regarding sexual behaviour, there are countless programmes using education or other interventions to promote safe sex, access to contraception, etc. This underlines the fact that the the issues you mentioned have been identified but that other measures were deemed more appropriate to address them.

Your take on the relative risks of drinking vs. having sex is also debatable: You're much more likely to develop an addiction if you start using a substance in teenage years, with serious lifelong consequences (that's especially true for tobacco but ought to apply to alcohol too). Consuming alcohol also comes with significant short-term risks risks: desinhibition and reduced coordination which causes violence and accidents, effects on learning and social behaviour. Most of what you count as adverse consequences of sex and driving probably involves alcohol too.

Answer 2

I challenge the premise of the question. If we go by a more detailed list, we find legal drinking age varies, and while it's often 18, lower ages aren't exactly rare.

We get the same result if we look at a list of minimum driving ages, where we get the same picture of 18 being the most common, with plenty of countries that have a lower limit.

The order also isn't fixed, with examples like a drinking age of 16/driving age of 18 in Germany, compared to a drinking age of ~21/driving age of ~16 in the US.

Instead of making a general statement of why drinking age is "always" higher than minimum legal driving age, need to look at specific cultures/countries, where it is possible to explain the discrepancies in either direction in historical/cultural/religious context. Big factors are usually the need to drive, and the cultural acceptance of drinking.

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There are different age limits for the 3, because they attempt to solve 3 entirely different problems:

Legal drinking age regulates a recreational activity, which can have side effects such as vandalism, car accidents, and liver damage.

Minimum legal driving age regulates the ability to acquire a license which is required for several professions, and may be required simply to live and work independently in some localities.

Age of consent protects minors from sexual exploitation, by making adults who engage in sexual activity with a person younger than the age of consent unable to legally claim that the sexual activity was consensual.

Answer 3

Restrictions like this are predicated on cultural beliefs about competence to make decisions. Age of consent is often set fairly low because historically 14-16 was a common age for people to marry and enter the workforce. That idea only started to lose traction in the 20th century, when public education extended effective parental control to 18, and a later dramatic increase in college attendance kept young people out of the workforce until 21 or 22. Adults may not like the thought of their children having sex, but adults are generally aware that by 16 children are physically, emotionally, and intellectually mature enough to make proper decisions about sex. The same logic works for operating vehicles: older teenagers are mature enough to recognize the risks and responsibilities of controlling two tons of speeding metal.

Drinking age, where it's set, is usually set higher because everyone recognizes that alcohol reduces competency and effective maturity. Someone who drinks is less cognizant of risks and and less responsible, often in proportion to the amount they drink, and so communities try to ensure that one is fully mature before they are allowed to drink without restriction or parental consent. In democratic nations, drinking age is usually the same as voting age (they differ in the US for historical reasons); that age is semi-arbitrarily chosen to represent full admission to adulthood and citizenship.