We didn’t have anything on the schedule for today except the debate tonight at 7 pm. Hardy figured we just spend the day preparing for the debate and making up a display to put outside the debate room with graphs and stats on it. We did look some stuff up, but that didn’t quite happen.

I slept in to 10 o’clock or so, then got breakfast, dinked around online and wrote up my blog entry, checked e-mail, checked the forums, etc. Dave made buttons. Hardy worked on a bio sheet for the debate. Hardy also called around to confirm things for the debate. It was to be held in “the well” of the statehouse, which is where the Vermont House holds their sessions. So Hardy needed to figure out just how it was going to be set up. He then called back someone in the Vermont military we were trying to get numbers from about the number of 18-20 year old Vermonters in the military and in Iraq, plus numbers of how many dead and injured in Iraq/Afganistan. We were told the person we needed to talk to would be in today, but he wasn’t.
We then got a call from WAFC, the NPR station that covers northeast New York, from Albany to Plattsburgh. They talked to Hardy and then talked to me. I gave a good interview, but I don’t know how or whether they’ll use it. I never heard anything of the other NPR interview I did. The more the merrier, especially if some of the folks in Albany catch wind of it. Maybe they could introduce a bill in New York.

Then the big boys called, the New York Times. I was actually napping at the time, but she called and spoke with Hardy for a bit. Then he came downstairs and passed the phone off to me. It went well, not as good perhaps as the NPR interview, but still good. We weren’t sure who sent her our way, but we are thinking Rep. Marron did it. Actually, she didn’t call, but she e-mailed Hardy and he called her back. She used Hardy’s non-youthrights.org e-mail which was odd because we haven’t been using that e-mail for the press releases and such. She didn’t have any of our numbers either (she does now). It must have been Rep. Marron.

Getting in the New York Times will be great though. I think it’ll be a first for NYRA. Out-of-state news though is what we need to keep this issue going, and keep discussion around the issue going. New York Times will be fantastic for that.

I napped some more, then got up and started looking up some stats online. I wanted to make a list of international drinking ages, yet the information online disagrees with each other or is incomplete. It is accepted by most in the movement that there are 4 countries with a drinking age of 21 - Ukraine, South Korea, Malaysia and the US. Yet Dr. Hanson’s site listed Ukraine and Malaysia at 18, and South Korea at 19. I know for a fact Ukraine, at the least, is 21, because one of our members is from Ukraine. So I called up Dr. Hanson, but he wasn’t there.

I moved on to reading over the study Mike Males gave me from Dee & Evans that is another, more recent study that shows raising the drinking age to 21 had no effect overall on reducing drunk driving. Males did one in the 80s (and was the first to look at the issue), then Peter Asch and David Levy did a study (more in-depth, Males claims) that came to the same conclusion. But both of these studies used data from the early 80’s. The benefit of the Dee & Evans study is it was published in 2001 and has data from the entire period since the drinking age was raised.

There was a drop in drunk driving fatalities over the last 20 years, that’s all true. But Dee & Evans looked at other factors such as seat belt use, better cars, BAC, and speed limits, and stopped them from cluttering up the results so they could just focus on the effect of raising the drinking age to 21. Once that was done, and once someone looked at the entire period for which we have data and more age groups than just 18-20 year olds, then we can see that raising the drinking age had NO effect on reducing drunk driving.
In fact before the drinking age was raised nationwide, in 1977, states with a drinking age of 18 had LOWER drunk driving rates across the board than states with a drinking age of 21. Then Dee & Evans compared the drop in drunk driving in states that used to have a 21 drinking age, and states that raised their drinking age from 18 to 21, and the drop in drunk driving was exactly the same. Now the 1997 figures are largely the same for all the states, whereas before the 18-drinking-age states had less drunk driving. If only more people knew this.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving always claim that raising the drinking age to 21 saved like 30,000 lives, but its utter bullshit. Lives have been saved, truly, but it had nothing to do with raising the drinking age. What their study does (assuming it was at least half-way credible, and wasn’t deliberately deceptive) is just look at 18-20 year old drunk driving deaths in the states, and don’t look at the whole picture. Sure enough, drunk driving deaths for folks 18-20 dropped when the drinking age was raised. What they don’t look at of course is the fact that drunk driving deaths went UP among 21-24 year olds by the same amount. Overall there was no lives saved, just lives transferred from one age group to another, thus proving that it doesn’t matter at what age someone starts drinking, there will always be that learning curve, whether it starts at 18 or 21 is the only issue. So MADD’s statistics are totally skewed and only show half the picture.

We didn’t finish the big display we were hoping to make, but its alright, I am now armed with a new study, plus some other interesting facts we turned up, like the fact that men drink and drive twice as much as women. Interesting.

I quickly got a shower and got dressed, and Hardy, Dave and I headed out. We met Ken in the parking lot of the capitol building in Montpelier. Then he totally hooked us up with some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. His cousin or brother or someone works at the Ben & Jerry’s plant, so got us a few tubs of ice cream. Very cool. We put it in the car and then went in. Jay and his dad were inside, but few others.

Hardy set up his video camera, put down everyone’s name cards, and Dave started setting up the table outside. Mallorie and two of the other guys from the high school/middle school I spoke at last week were there. I’m glad they came. People filed in bit by bit. It wasn’t a totally full house, but there were some students there, which was definitely good. Jay said he counted like 35 legislators who stopped in. That’s good news. A reporter or two were there, and a photographer was snapping pictures. A camera from Channel 5 showed up late, but it was good he was there.

Hardy introduced the debate, then Jay (as moderator) introduced the panelists. Me and Rep. Dick Marron were on the pro side. Rep. Marron, from Stowe, was the one who introduced the bill. On the con-side was Rep. Shaw, some random opponent of the bill in the house, and Commissioner Sleeper, of the Department of Public Safety. We each gave our opening remarks, Rep. Marron started off, since he introduced the bill, then Shaw, then Sleeper, and then me. Lacking a representative from the Pissed-off Mothers Syndicate, Sleeper did his best job describing the horrific scene of pulling mangled bodies out of wrecked cars to work up the crowd. Wouldn’t-ya-know, the paper quoted that part.
In my opening statement I introduced the two main reasons we sought to lower the drinking age. First, we support it as a civil rights issue. We feel it is ageism, and is absolutely unfair to tell someone at 18 they are mature and responsible enough to drive a tank through Baghdad, but if they want to open a can of beer, then they suddenly are a silly little kid. Its hypocrisy and wrong. The second big reason we support lowering the drinking age is for public safety reasons. We feel that were we to allow drinking age younger ages, and start things in the home, and make it so drinking isn’t as big a deal as it is in this country, then alcohol abuse and drunk driving will decrease. I promoted, as usual, a more European approach to alcohol, that is much safer and reasonable than how the US handles it.

The format was to take questions from the audience. The questions were mixed, and covered a lot of issues. Everyone was respectful, and asked good questions. The only hostility I sensed was from some alcohol councillors who pounded me on the “brain study” bs. I gave my good soundbiteish answer about how if alcohol causes irreversible brain damage if consumed under the age of 21 (or 25, or whatever new age people are saying), then the entire rest of the world who have lower drinking ages than the US must obviously be brain damaged. Plus considering even Americans (regardless of the drinking age) start drinking age 12 on average, then all Americans are brain damaged. In fact the only people in the whole world who don’t drink are Mormons and Muslims. Clearly they are our intellectual superiors.

Shaw was mostly a non-entity in the debate. He didn’t speak much, and when he did he didn’t make much sense, heh. So mostly it was Commissioner Sleeper, who seemed (to me at least) to be a nice guy. Unlike other opponents I’ve faced off with in the past, he was respectful and polite. His problem though was the fact he was using totally bogus numbers to make his case. Well to be fair, his numbers weren’t bogus (they were the same we had) but his interpretation of them were far afield from reality. He totally mischaracterized the numbers and what they said. It was shocking. The graph is as plain as day to any reasonable person. Drunk driving was decreasing in the early 80’s when the drinking age was 18, then the drinking age was raised to 21 in 1986 and drunk driving deaths spiked immediately afterwards. It shows it clear as day, and the graph is taken directly from Commissioner Sleeper’s department, right from their website. Yet he could look at those same numbers and tell people something else. 2+2=5 apparently.

I didn’t hammer him on that as much as I should have, but yea, he was totally, totally wrong. Several students asked Sleeper and Shaw about the civil rights aspect of the debate, about how unjust it was to send people to war who couldn’t drink a beer. Neither responded to it. Sleeper said that it wasn’t his area of expertise and didn’t think it would be appropriate for him to comment on it. I mean, I respect that and I’m not going to hold it against him. He came to discuss the public safety side of things, and that’s fine. I wish Shaw had tried to address the morality issue, but he didn’t. So the fact that both refused to discuss the issue means it was a resounding victory for Rep. Marron and I. We made our equality points, and they just hung there unaddressed. Honestly there is nothing that someone can say to it, it is unjust and everyone knows it no matter who they are. In fact after the debate Sleeper came up to Jay and told him that in truth he does agree with us on the moral issues involved in sending people to war at 18 and letting them drink at 21. But he opposes it purely from a public safety standpoint.

I think the debate went well. I know that I was on top of my game, as I have been for much of this week. I am king of the soundbite, and I have a lot of short, great sounding lines on the subject. I was much more polished a speaker than Rep. Shaw and Rep. Marron. Sleeper was good, but I may have been a bit slicker than him even, but I’d need to check the tape to verify, because he was good. With all the speaking I’ve done on the issue this week, I’m definitely getting better with it, and I’ve added a few new cool soundbites to my arsenal. Like this one I used: “Many people want to make this purely about public safety and ignore the civil rights issues involved, but if our only goal was to stop drunk driving, then perhaps we should look at the fact that men in this country drink and drive at twice the rate women do. Should we then pass a law that bans all men in the country from drinking? Of course not, because that would be sexism and no one would accept it. Yet why can we get away with banning just young people from drinking? It is ageism and is no more acceptable than any other unjust discrimination.”

At the end we did our closing remarks in reverse order, so I again emphasized my two main points that a 21 drinking age was unjust age discrimination, and that lowering it and allowing parents to drink with their kids would make drinking safer in this country. Then Sleeper, then Shaw, then Marron finished us off. Marron did good in the debate btw, much, much, better than Shaw. So at times it felt like a 2 on 1. Cause Marron and I were both doing well, and making good points, and Rep. Shaw just wasn’t in it at all.

The debate ended, and everyone went their separate ways. Dave, Hardy and I stopped off at Al’s French Fries for dinner. Cheap food, good food, and… well cheap food. Cheap is good enough for me.

We got back to HQ, and Hardy set up the video camera to record Channel 5. They did something on our debate, but it was real short. They used on soundbite from me (I don’t even remember which one, but it was good. Oh yes.) Something about letting kids drink with their parents to gradually introduce them to alcohol. Then they showed Sleeper’s response (which really didn’t help his case much), he said “So you want kids of 16 or 14 or 12 drinking at home with their parents?” Ummm, yea, hehe. Thanks for repeating me, you rock! And that was it. So while a short spot, it was good because they got a good point in by me, and the clip they used from Sleeper didn’t really make his point, but only reemphasized my point. I feel a bit bad for Sleeper that they couldn’t use a better quote but in the words of Xav/Willy…. OMG!!! H3 w4s t0t4lly pwned!!! I am teh r0xx0r!!!!

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