National Minimum Drinking Age Act
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 (23 U.S.C. ยง 158) was passed on July 17, 1984 by the United States Congress as a mechanism whereby all states would become thereafter required to legislate the age of 21 years as a minimum age for purchasing and publicly possessing alcoholic beverages. Under the Federal Aid Highway Act, a state with a minimum age below 21 would be subjected to a ten percent decrease in its annual federal highway apportionment.
While this act did not outlaw the consumption of alcoholic beverages by those under 21 years of age, seven states and Washington D.C. extended its provisions into an outright ban. These states are: Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The minimum drinking age is a state law. However, most states still permit "underage" consumption of alcohol in some circumstances. In some states, no restriction on private consumption is made, while in others, consumption is only allowed in specific locations, in the presence of consenting and supervising family members as in the states of California, Colorado, Montana, New York, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The act also does not seek to criminalize alcohol consumption during religious occasions; (e.g. communion wines, Kiddush).
Read more about National Minimum Drinking Age Act: History, Opposition, Relevant Statistics, Application On College Campuses
Famous quotes containing the words national, minimum, drinking, age and/or act:
“The progress
Is permanent like the preordained bulk
Of the First National Bank
Like fish sauce, but agreeable.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)