The Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs announced yesterday it would award more than $19 million in block grants to all 50 states, the District, and five U.S. territories in an effort to enforce state and local underage drinking laws.
“We need to do everything in our power to protect the futures of our nation’s best and brightest,” said Jeffrey Sedgwick, acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs, in a statement. “This funding will support law enforcement and community efforts to curb underage drinking and save lives.”
The money will be used to support activities including compliance checks of alcohol stores to reduce sales to minors, crackdowns on false identification, and “cops in shops” to discourage youths from trying to buy alcohol.
The grants were made through the Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws program, which is the only federal program exclusively aimed at preventing underage drinking.
The announcement comes just days after reports of college leaders from all over the country, including Duke and Johns Hopkins, supporting the lowering of the drinking age to curb binge drinking.
Every indicators shows that among our youth, especially college students, the switch is from a variety of unfamiliar and esoteric drugs to the drug commonly found in the most respectable and law abiding homes. In this society we use alcohol for a variety of reasons; to be sociable, to be accepted, to relax, to gain courage, to improve self-esteem, and yes, to add romance to our lives. And, too often, for many of us alcohol is used to escape from depression, fears, anxiety, and other inadequacies real or imagined. It is for these and other reasons the abuse of alcohol is on the rise.
According to the federal National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, college drinking contributes to about 1,700 student deaths, 599,000 injuries and 97,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape annually.
"Defying one law makes it easier for youths to justify defying another, perhaps with more serious consequences
Posted by: Jim Green | August 23, 2008 at 01:26 PM