Drinking Age
In response to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, which reduced by up to 10% the federal highway funding of any state which did not have a minimum purchasing age of 21, the New York Legislature raised the drinking age from 19 to 21, effective December 1, 1985. (The drinking age had been 18 for many years before the first raise in 1982, to 19.) Persons under 21 are prohibited from purchasing alcohol or possessing alcohol with the intent to consume, unless the alcohol was given to that person by their parent or legal guardian. There is no law prohibiting where people under 21 may possess or consume alcohol that was given to them by their parents, they may consume it in public and even on alcohol-selling premises such as bars and restaurants. Persons under 21 are prohibited from having a blood alcohol level of more than 0.02% while driving.
Read more about this topic: Alcohol Laws Of New York
Famous quotes containing the words drinking and/or age:
“One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which [Clarence] Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table, at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, “Who has put pubic hair on my coke?””
—Anita Hill (b. 1956)
“The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)