State Rep. Tom Rukavina is one of the great characters of the Iron Range. I mean great in that he personifies our unusual culture rather well and that his heart is usually in the right place, too. That said, he has a knack for randomly enhancing the Range’s longstanding reputation as a place of loud, ethnic drunkards. I don’t know that his latest stance moves us in the the 21st century all that much, especially coupled with the Range delegation’s latest protests about the state smoking ban. Yes, Minnesota, the Iron Range does worry about things other than smoking and drinking.
Just not publicly.
Iron Range Lawmaker Wants to Lower Drinking Age (WDIO News, Duluth)
The debate over a lower drinking age is back at the capitol. Rep. Tom Rukavina, D-Virginia, is helping sponsor legislation that would lower the drinking age in bars, to 18. This change would not affect off-sale liquor, so teens could NOT buy beer from
liquor sales. He tried lowering it back in 1999, to 19, but that measure didn’t pass. Rukavina said the bill is authored by Phyllis Kahn, of Minneapolis. But he believes that people are treated as adults in every other way when they turn 18, except in regards to drinking. Rukavina also said that binge drinking is a problem, so if people learned in a controlled environment, like a bar, things would improve. He also said that underage drinking cases are clogging the court system and costing us big bucks there.If the state did lower the drinking age, they could forfeit 10% of their highway funding. For Minnesota, that would be over $50 million dollars.
Law enforcement has traditionally opposed the move to a lower drinking age, citing the high number of deaths in young people, on our roads. Rukavina said he wasn’t sure how much support the bill will have, but he said to him, it just makes sense.
The bill was introduced for the first time, today in the House.
To be fair, Vermont lawmakers are looking at a similar proposal. My general opinion is that the age of adulthood should be universal. But that’s easier to say than implement in law. On one hand binge drinking is a cultural phenomenon spurred by the “forbidden fruit” image we put on alcoholic beverages in America. On the other, I don’t know that legalizing bar drinking for 18-year-olds while leaving off sale liquor sales illegal is going to get us anywhere.
“You can drink, kids, but never at home.”
The risk of losing federal highway funds alone will probably kill this bill, but here we are talking about it anyway.
He’s right, but the highway funding is the deal-killer, as it has been since the 1980s. Unethical government blackmail.
I think MADD needs to slow down and think about how parents are. Not all parents are going to let their kids drink if the bill passes or not. So I think either way parents will still have the control over their underage teens. And being a teen with using alcohol and drugs at an early age after doing it for awhile it gets old and its not that fun.