Offer young adults a license to drink?
Wednesday's Baltimore Sun covered a new report calling for raising the driving age to 17 or 18 ("Group calls for higher driving age," Sept. 10). The article fairly covers the pros and cons of that idea and presents interesting statistics on injuries and deaths involving young drivers.
Recently, The Baltimore Sun and other media outlets reported on the proposal by a coterie of university presidents to debate lowering the legal drinking age to 18 ("Colleges: Drinking age 'not working,'" Aug. 19). However, many advocacy groups oppose such a change, asserting that thousands of lives have been saved by keeping the drinking age at 21.
These two issues are linked in an obvious way, and the discussion of each proposal must be broadened to include the other.
One idea I've seen would be to grant a "drinking license" to young adults age 18 to 21.
A holder of such a license would also not be able to obtain an operator's permit (or driver's license) until age 21, at which time the drinking license would no longer be needed.
The two reports represent dots that surely need to be connected.
A. Brinton Cooper III, Bel Air
Raise driving age, lower drinking age
While we'd all be better off if no one drank and people couldn't drive until age 21, that idea is not practical ("Group calls for higher driving age," Sept. 10).
How about the government working out a compromise to allow drinking beer and wine at age 18 and raising the driving age to 17 or 18?
David M. Butler, Baltimore
Irrelevant factoids distort the debate
The article "Group calls for higher driving age" (Sept. 10) quotes a meaningless statistic that "over a five-year period, 13,889 people were injured and 125 people killed in Maryland in crashes involving 16- to 20-year-old drivers."
But this figure says nothing that relates to the question of whether the minimum driving age should be raised.
It does not say what percentage of those accidents involved 16-year-old drivers, what percentage of these accidents were caused by the young drivers or how this statistic compares with the accident rates for other drivers.
So why did The Baltimore Sun bother printing it in the first place?
Jeff Mueller, Eldersburg