i am actually more against someking than drinking, but i think we reached a point where tightening the law has no longer any affect. The drunk children have been there when alcohol was only for 16 years old and above and they will stay there for sure. What may change is the places where they drink. No longer in public where you can see them and react if they drank too much. It is more like "if you can not see them it is not a problem".

if you want to pretend car accidents of teenagers or young adults you actualy have to set the minimum age for driving licenes higher lets say at 23? There are so much young people driving drunken even if they now what can happen....

Another problem is the willingnes for violence especially after drinking alcohol. But that is problem that you can not fix with laws.....

(I'm from Germany)

Well... that's an oversimplification in my opinion. It's more a kind of social problem. Most of my aquaintances don't get violent when drunk. However, I know that there're lots of folks that get violent but I know none of them personally. It totally depends on the individual.
One comment on this driving license thing:
If you drink too much, you're likely to cause some trouble (and sometimes substantial damage) to your environment.
If you drive, you might cause an accident. Such an accident will most likely a) cause substantial damage to yourself, b) substantial damage to every other person involved, i.e. your fellow passengers, pedestrians, other car drivers, etc.
I think it requires a lot more responsibility to drive a car than to drink alcohol, as you practically have responsibility not only for yourself but also your co-passengers. Violence that involves drug abuse only occures in certain places, like discos and so on. If you go to such places you basically know about the risks. There's always some idiot who could go crazy and stab you for no reason, or set somehing on fire just for fun. If you however avoid such places you'll hardly face anything like that.

I have to admit that I, at least partly, think that way. But honestly, what do you expect? For me, this story is no diffrent from the issue about smoking. The core of this particular problem lies in our present-day social structures and any kind of internal reformation (i.e. modifying the laws) won't change much in the long run.

Interesting conversation.

I don't think, that tighten up the law would make any sense. If young people, which are not allowed to buy alcohol really want it, they find a way. For example brothers or sisters buy the alcohol.

Maybe another way makes more sense:
In countries like Sweden you have to pay a lot for alcohol because of a special tax. Consequently young people drink less alcohol. This would be positive for our whole health system. Because how many diseases and deaths in Germany are the result of alcohol?!

The federal system in Germany combined with the local election dates scattered through out the 4 years
prevents radical changes on countrywide issues by one party until the bad situation is undeniable and
it's pretty much to late for a smooth transition.
The thing most politicians of the major parties are really worried about is getting re-elected in a few months.
Therefore they don't really like to raise taxes on popular items (except on petrol, tabaco and the VAT).

Beer and other alcoholic beverages are very popular in Germany. So I don't think we will see any change in that area
any time soon. Although the cost for the misuse of alcohol for the health insurance system are at a significant level.
I guess, a solution based on higher taxes can only be successfully implemented on a truly European base
otherwise people would import it from another European country or order everything via the Internet...

The already increased the tax on the so called "Alkopops" which are a mixture of strong alkohol with soft drinks in a way that you don't taste the actual alcohol, but feel it when you get drunk (very) fast. In the end i would say that it was useless. Instead of buying pre-mixed drinks they started to mix it on their own. The cheapest bottle of vodka is offered for about 5 Euro (0.7 liter bottle) in the supermarket around my corner. Stuff to erase the taste the so called "Nachtrinken" like red bull, faked red bull, orange juice and so on aren't that expensive.

The statistic shows that increasing the tax lowered the consume of "Alkopops" but that doesn't mean that this mixtures wasn't replace. In my opion the politicans are just changing the appearance of the alcohol problem in the teenage age. They are aware that a real solution is far more compilacted, but it is better to do something useless instead of doing someing usefull which is expensive and effective!

eeboot, can you explain what the so-called "Nachtrinken" is? Thanks!

I totally agree with you, by the way. Good argumentation, I think.
Well, as I already mentioned a couple of times before, I'm a little older than the average user here. What I can't understand - and never could understand - is why people who don't even like the taste of hard liquor, like vodka, whiskey, schnaps or what have you, always want to drink it. This term "Nachsaufen" shows the absurdity of it all, doesn't it? It is so disgusting that you can't stand the taste in your mouth and have to sort of rinse it out. Why not keep it out of the system in the first place? Is being sick all over the place, feeling hung over, not knowing what happens to you while you're too drunk to realise anything - is all that really all that tempting?
Although I wouldn't want to ban alcohol for young people - say 21 and older - generally, my opinion is that the problem should be considered as dangerous, because it seems to be treated as a kind of joke in some of the media, as if it was only a fashion.

Duckduck (only buttermilk)

Until a few years ago I was part of those people who drank the hard liquor. It was a simple math problem. Besides the high entry fee you have to pay for entering some night clubs you pay quite a lot for something to drink. Getting tipsy is sure one important thing if you go out to party (for young people in general teenagers), but on he other hand you don't want to spend you entire money during one evening. The simple soloution is drinking outside the discotheque which leads you to the hard stuff like Vodka or Whiskey.
Especially if you are at younger age you tend to miss the point where you are just tipsy and end up total drunk which often leads to some blackouts at the next morning and having a bad hangover.

I agree with you that the most people are not aware how dangerous it can be if you "hit the bottle" especially if the hard alcohol is involved.