In Australia, where one must only be 18 to drink legally, federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon dismissed calls to increase the drinking age to 19, although she did acknowledge that 70 young people are admitted to the hospital and four young people die every week because of alcohol abuse.
Mark Metherell of The Age writes that as state police chiefs prepared to crack down on drunken violence by young people next month in the annual ”schoolies” ritual, Roxon rejected a call to raise the drinking age.
The minister said the Government’s preventive health taskforce had not called for an increase in the drinking age.
”Of course people in the community will raise these issues and will continue to do that and we will, of course, continue to follow that debate,” Roxon said.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has criticized binge drinking by young people, but sidestepped the call by mental health advocate Professor Ian Hickie, of the University of Sydney, for the drinking age to be raised given growing evidence of the vulnerability of the brains of young adults to damage from alcohol ingestion.
Dr. John Herron, the chairman of the government-appointed Australian National Council on Drugs, has also said he personally supports Hickie’s call and that the council would discuss the matter later this month.
Professor Bob Moodie, the chairman of the preventive health taskforce, said he was not against lifting the drinking age, but said that given the failure of enforcement against underage drinking, Australia’s effort should focus on stronger licensing provisions against liquor outlets and more public information campaigns against alcohol abuse.
”The big area of change is in respecting the law in the first place,” Moodie said.
He said that in past years, Australians had wanted to liberalize the approach on alcohol but had not managed to deal with the downside of poor management of liquor outlets and clubs and their density in some areas.
But the chief executive of the Mental Health Council of Australia, David Crosbie, said the research showed that the higher the drinking age, the fewer problems there were with underage drinking.
”There is little doubt that if the drinking age in Australia is increased, there would be less deaths and hospitalizations among young people,” Crosbie said.
”While the extent of benefit is debated, I have never seen anyone argue that alcohol-related harm would be higher if the drinking age was higher.”
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