Tired old "Drive for 25" campaign just won't die

Every election cycle in Patria, "Drive for 25" - a tired, lame campaign to raise the legal drinking age to 25 - seems to come up as the election campaign drags on. Campaign 2018 is no exception. The law-and-order National Union has virtually no hand in advocating Drive for 25. It  certainly does not fit the SRM's Patria First agenda. The hoary old campaign is being pushed mainly by what is left of Patria's discredited and now-irrelevant social conservatives and many of the same fear-mongering dinosaurs who have littered the @Patriavotes2018 Twitter feed with "PATRIOTS AWAKE!" and "FIGHT THE EVIL REDS!" tweets warning of the impending communist takeover should the Social Democrats and their allies (Amrita and Chakra Parties) win a plurality of seats in the 51st Congress.

Session after session, bills that would raise Patria's drinking age are introduced by backbench members, usually by representatives of obscure or one-seat parties such as Family Values Party and Chastity Party, and they are routinely laughed out of Congress or voted down after about two minutes of debate. The legal age in Patria is 18, i.e. the same age at which one can legally serve in the military, marry, vote, buy a gun and do a whole lot of other adult things. But underage drinking is not a serious problem in Patria.

The tired old social-cons and neo-prohibitionists who argue for "Drive for 25" claim that the higher drinking age will not only take drinking out of college and university campuses but will reduce impaired driving. There is little evidence that a higher drinking age will reduce the prevalence of student drinking (the legal age of 21 in the US does not seem to be much of a deterrent to American college kids routinely getting hammered) or will help fight the scourge of drunk driving (most convicted drunk drivers are not underage kids). There is virtually no tolerance for impaired driving in Patria. Convicted drunk drivers are routinely sent to jail, not given probation, community service or slap on the wrist fines. Even if they don't do hard time, stupid dick-heads who are caught "boozing and cruising" are given years-long driver's license suspensions, in many cases a lifetime ban on ever getting behind the wheel again, sober or not. Patria has moved on from the mawkish, preachy and likely ineffective ads that are aired by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in Canada. Prohibition didn't work in the 1920s and neither will MADD's ad campaigns that feature clean-cut, now-dead teenagers, grieving parents of the deceased kids, and blood-and-guts gory car accident scenes.

Drunk driving can kill. But pointless campaigns like raising the drinking age to 25 (so why not 30?) are not the way to address the problem. Just kill Drive for 25.